eter Straub is often regarded as one of the masters of horror and fright fiction. His name is synonymous with superb suspense. He has built a reputation for creating a sophisticated mix of style and substance and scares. Throughout his career, stretching over three decades now, the New York writer has used terror and tension not merely to scare but to explore more serious ideas and raise frightening fiction to the next level.
Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee in March 1943, and knew at 16 that he wanted to be a novelist. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Wisconsin in 1965. He went on to collect his master's degree in contemporary literature at Columbia University.
He is the author of such classics as Ghost Story, Shadowland, Floating Dragon, The Hellfire Club, Mr. X and a pair of novels co-written with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. His latest novel, In the Night Room, won a Bram Stoker award in June of 2005; this is his sixth award from the Horror Writers Association.
Besides the six Bram Stoker awards, he is the recipient of two International Horror Guild Awards, two World Fantasy Awards and one British Fantasy Society Award. His Web site is at peterstraub.net.
You recently won your sixth Bram Stoker award for In the Night Room. Did you expect such recognition when you were writing the book? What does the award mean to you?
Straub: I never waste time thinking about awards when I am writing, and I hope no one else does, either. Instead of daydreaming about "recognition," I was hoping that I could make it to the last page without breaking my neck or otherwise injuring myself.
Winning the Stoker surprised me, because I thought I was completely out of the running. I didn't think I could win it two years in a row, and it seemed to me that Stephen King deserved every laurel he could get for coming to the end of the Dark Tower series.
What inspired In the Night Room?
Straub: Initially, I was making yet another attempt to rewrite Geoffrey Household's great Rogue Male, this time with a female protagonist, Willy Patrick. Alas, after two or three months I found that I was completely bored with poor Willy's backstory and couldn't stand the thought of writing page after page about the orphanage where she had mainly grown up, so I seized the first idea that came to me, that of reaching deep inside the book and turning it inside out.
What horror, fantasy or science-fiction movies you have seen lately?
Straub: Lately, none, but not all that long ago I saw a bunch of DVDs, mostly of Japanese horror films, but also Fear X, which I loved so much I watched it twice through. The nice things about the Japanese movies were that they were terrifically moody and resisted any sort of neat narrative conclusion.
You were working on a book with the working title Queen of the Nile. What ever happened to that book?
Straub: I don't remember the title, but that contained my initial ideas for the book that eventually became Lost Boy Lost Girl. A process like the one I described above went on for this book [In the Night Room], too—I had to yank it inside out to be able to face writing it. Twice is more than enough times to yank books inside out. I hope to refrain from this practice in the future.
Is The Talisman still going to be turned into a movie? What can you tell us?
Straub: Steven Spielberg had a great script, and everything was set to go. Then the director quit, as did his replacement. From that point on, the project was roadkill. Maybe someday in the future it will rise and walk again.
You've written about your character Tim Underhill in a number of novels, such as Koko, The Throat, In the Night Room and Lost Boy Lost Girl. How do you keep the character interesting for yourself and your readers? Do you have any plans to bring him in back in the future?
Straub: I'm not sure about using Underhill again, though I think I might do just that and call him by another name, as a writer invented by Underhill who writes the book Underhill was thinking about writing at the end of In the Night Room. I like Tim Underhill—he's a lot like me, but better at everything, more honest, braver, nicer. Unlike me, he is a gay combat veteran. Also unlike me, he seems to have been celibate for a long time; at least he was before he met Willy Patrick.
Do you have any work in progress? What is in the future for Peter Straub?
Straub: I'm working on a three-part story, which will make up a short novel when melted together. Right now it is called Lee and the Eel, but that will probably change. After that I'll go back to my previous project, a kind of reimagining of The Turn of the Screw.
Ghost Story was featured in The Stephen King Horror Library. That novel has been called "one of the finest horror novels published in this quarter of the twentieth century." The book has been around for over 25 years now: To what do you attribute the novel's longevity and popularity and critical acclaim?
Straub: The book was a great pleasure to write, and I think it was also a pleasure to read. It's a novel, not merely a horror novel. At least, that was what I thought when I was having so much fun writing it.
Was Ghost Story paying homage to such ghost story writers as Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne and M.R. James?
Straub: Yes, that was really up front, visible to all. I inserted a version of The Turn of the Screw, and was going to have the characters retell stories by Hawthorne and [Edgar Allan] Poe, but the introduction then seemed to overwhelm the rest of the book, so I never went beyond the James story. Of course, my point was to indicate how deeply into American fiction the ghost story, the horror story, penetrates.
What is about ghosts that attracts your attention? Do you believe ghosts really exist?
Straub: Ghosts accompany us everywhere, and the longer you live, the more of them are following you around.
Julia, If You Could See Me Now and Ghost Story have one thing in common: The past eventually becomes more important than the present. Agree or disagree?
Straub: In a lot of the things I've written, not just those books you mentioned, the past seeps into the present, stakes multiple claims on it, inhabits it so thoroughly that the past more or less becomes the present. In a real way, the past does not exist; what was hidden there demands to be made known and it speaks in code, in aberrations of behavior, in repetitions of behavior, in the way people speak, the words they use and the things they see out of the corner of their eyes.
If you could be any monster, which monster would you be, and why?
Straub: Which monster? What about Bob Evans? I bet he was a very entertaining monster in his heyday. What about Steve McQueen? I'm sure he had some super-duper monster days. OK, I pick Steve McQueen.
You wrote about automobile accidents in both Mystery and The Throat. At the age of 7, you were struck down by a car and had several months before recuperation. Can you tell how that incident shaped your life and writing?
Straub: Well, I covered this fairly thoroughly in the books you mention and on my Web site. Speaking generally, when I was far too young for such an experience, being struck by a car and gravely injured ("turned into a bloody rag" is how this is expressed in my inner language) stripped me of the conviction that the world was a safe place. As a result, I saw threat everywhere, and still do, more or less. Such a viewpoint is a great aid to a horror writer; in fact, it amounts to a tremendously unfair advantage over the competition.
You edited Peter Straub's Ghosts and Conjunctions #39, The New Fabulist—what was it like to be in the editor's seat? Is this something you might do again?
Straub: I liked doing both of those books a lot, as I did with the Library of America's Lovecraft volume [H.P. Lovecraft: Weird Tales]. Before a great deal of time passes, I want to put together a comprehensive anthology of contemporary horror writing. The point would be to demonstrate how much range exists now, not only how much good work is being done by very good young writers, but how thoroughly they demolish the boundaries and restrictions of genre.
Last word?
Straub: Um, "fractious." No, "limpid." No, "commensurate." Damn. OK, this is my last shot—"helplessnesslessness."
And there we are!
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