And by the time we got back to our house, we were both really excited, because we knew that this was really sort of a masterwork.” And so I was driving and my wife opened it and she started to read it to me. With the first sentence, I felt this enormous relief. I just wanted very much to write a novel that would make money so I wouldn’t have to get a job. “I didn’t know much about the field at that time. “‘Julia’ was a novel that involved what turned out to be a ghost, so it was a horror novel,” he told The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 1996. Straub did not originally aspire to write about the supernatural in fact, he turned to it only after two more conventional novels went bust.

Rice’s debut, “Interview With the Vampire,” came out in 1976.Ī fan of Henry James and John Ashbery - he had published several chapbooks of poetry before turning to novels - Mr. King’s first novel, “Carrie,” appeared in 1974, the year before “Julia” Ms. Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) and William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” (1971), the genre was becoming mainstream.

Straub, who counterposed the darkness of his texts with a peppy personality and a preppy wardrobe of bright shirts and bow ties, took up horror fiction at the right time. “Julia” (1975) was published a year after Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie,” and a year before Anne Rice’s debut, “Interview With the Vampire.” Straub won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that had previously been sidelined as sub-literary. Starting with “Julia,” his third novel, about a woman who is haunted by a spirit that may or may not be her dead daughter, Mr. Not that he could complain about what critics and readers thought. Novels like “Julia” (1975) and “Ghost Story” (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. His death, at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, was caused by complications after breaking a hip, his wife, Susan Straub, said. Peter Straub, whose literary novels of terror, mystery and the supernatural placed him in the top ranks of the horror-fiction boom of the 1970s and ’80s, alongside writers like Ira Levin, Anne Rice and his close friend and collaborator Stephen King, died on Sunday in Manhattan.

Ghost story by peter straub review