eter Straub has written within the blanket genre of "speculative fiction" with literacy and critical legitimacy, pleasing fans with a sophisticated mix of style and substance over a career that has spanned in excess of 25 years. He kicked the door in without trying, with such books as Julia, Ghost Story, The Hellfire Club and The Talisman, written with genre giant Stephen King. His prose is intelligent without talking down to the reader, pulling off the most difficult trick of all: keeping his stories both entertaining and exciting.
Following his British Fantasy Society Award for Floating Dragon, he went on to win four Bram Stoker Awards for The Throat, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, Mr. X and Magic Terror, and two World Fantasy Awards for Koko and The Ghost Village.
Peter Straub continues to explore dark themes both for us and with us, reaching into mystery and suspense as he continues to lead the way. There's always new ground to be broken, which is evident with his second collaboration with Stephen King—their follow-up to The Talisman called Black House.
You've written a number of mystery and suspense novels. Is it harder to keep a mystery mysterious or a thriller thrilling?
Straub: To me, they are very much the same thing. My mystery novels aren't really like the crime novels that anybody has written. When I called my novel Mystery, it never occurred to me everybody in the world would look at that and would say, "Oh that's like Ghost Story—he's referring to the genre." I was referring to Mystery with a capital M, the mysterious realm that we sometime apprehend around us, with a sense of the numinous, with a sense of things unknown. That is something that is not of interest to Rex Stout, Agatha Christie—it is of very little interest to Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, whom I revere and are good friends of mine— whose work I enjoy.
What you're asking about, in my terms, is narrative tension. It is very important to me to keep building up a gathering head of steam, so the reader does really wonder, "What will happen next?" There is very little difference between the way that feels in the basically crime context or spooky context. It's the same sense of anxiety, uncertainty, facing the unknown, being puzzled—in short, a layer
of suspense.
I would consider you the jazz-man of horror. Who are some of the jazz musicians and artists you enjoy?
Straub: "The jazz-man of horror"—that's very nice, I love it.
The heart in my taste of jazz lies with the people I fell in love with when I first started to hear jazz. My taste has expanded a great deal and I will get to those people in a second.
The core of my taste would sound very palatable for all those who came into the (John) Coltrane era: Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Zoot Sims. From there it folds out to Lester Young, Dexter Gordon—mainly talking about tenor saxophone players. Of course, no jazz fan can't worship
Charlie Parker.
When I started listening to jazz, I started listening year by year to the music being made at that time. Then we got up into the late '60s, what Coltrane was doing at that period—and if you weren't attuned to it, it sounded like axe murders. It was overblowing at the top of the horn, no
underlying rhythm, no underlying harmony, simply passionate or tortured or ecstatic cries. So there was no place to go from there. You can only go back after that. You can't develop that sound. You can domesticate it, which many thousands of jazz players have done since, domesticate Coltrane and so you can squeeze it back into the harmonic box. What I realized I had to do, I had to go back to the
music I had no time for when I was younger.
Once I got into my mid-30s, I started listening backwards. Back to Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Duke Ellington, ultimately to Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. That is generations of music and if that is what you are interested in, it's a bottomless well.
When you were writing Ghost Story, did you imagine it would be as successful as it was? What are your thoughts on the movie?
Straub: When I was writing Ghost Story, I was very aware that I was at another level from the work I had done before that. I knew something was going to happen, I knew my life was going to change in some way. I was going to make a considerable amount of money. The book seemed so much more powerful than anything I had written. So of course, I immediately informed my agent and I immediately informed my publishers to get them worked up. If the book had been a dud, I would have looked like a fool. They all kind of agreed with me, and the end result was that it performed way beyond my expectations. I thought, I might make about a hundred thousand dollars out of the book—to me, that
was a vast amount of money. It did infinitely better than that.
When Ghost Story was filmed, I was very pleased to think about how the movie might be. It sounded to me like it was full of potential. I loved the cast, and the director [John Irving] had done a BBC version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [from the John Le Carre book], so I knew he could
handle difficult, complex narratives.
The studio had promised to keep me in touch, promised to let me read the script and offered to let me come to the set and all of that. I should have known something was wrong when the studio rigidly froze me off. They told Larry Cohen, the screenwriter, not to let me see the screenplay.
I hadn't known what they had done until I went to a screening in New York. I didn't want to admit then how bad I thought it was. It was too disappointing. For me, it was a lost effort.
A lot of people liked that movie and it sold another million paperbacks, so it did me a power of good. Every now and then, I run into somebody who is very fond of that movie, and I'm glad they are.
If it had been 10 percent better, it would have been 100 percent more effective.
There's been talk of turning The Talisman into a miniseries over the years. Any progress?
Straub: I have some very interesting news about that.
The Talisman was bought by Universal as a vehicle for Steven Spielberg. Universal bought it because Spielberg told them to. In 1984, Spielberg had tremendous clout. So they bought, gave it to him and he lost interest. It was no longer the sort of thing he felt he wanted to do. He wanted to do more mainstream, more worthy projects. It vanished.
The miniseries idea was floated. Spielberg liked the idea of having a miniseries. He had people in mind to direct it. It went through various revisions and that died.
Five or six years later, Kathleen Kennedy and Spielberg were back to being partners, decided once again to do it as a miniseries for ABC. That sounded like it would work (Mick Garris had written a screenplay and had planned to direct the project). They had a very good script
and that died.
Now there's a friend of mine, who is a very, very good writer. I won't name him. But he told me he got a call from his agent, who asked if he would be interested in doing a screenplay for a movie of The Talisman. My friend said, "Who would direct it?" And his agent said, "Spielberg." My friend said, "Yeah, I'd like to give that a crack." Who knows, it might happen. I would be very, very pleased to see that particular combination.
The Talisman was re-released shortly before Black House. Both novels ended up on the best-seller list at the same time. Were you surprised that there is still a lot of interest for The Talisman?
Straub: It was very gratifying to see that. Random House was especially gratified because they had sold a lot more copies of the new version of The Talisman then they had expected to, both in hardback and paperback. It was warming and rewarding the book would get a whole new audience all over again. I don't think that happens very much.
I had very mixed feelings about The Talisman for a long time. But when I read it in preparation for starting work again with Stephen King on Black House, I surprised myself on how
much I liked it. I thought it was really, really a nice book.
Did the Internet and electronic media make the collaboration of Black House easier?
Straub: Yeah, that's right. Though we had one of the first modems in the early '80s. The modems were big machines with telephones on top of them. You had to dial the number, we didn't have hard disks then. The floppys were like 78 records. This was before Windows, so you had to punch in a certain DOS code. Then you could hear your computer make these digesting sounds. Grumble, click, growl. It went on for half an hour while it sent a hundred pages.
When I got the pages from Steve [King] I could see them come onto the empty floppy. Line by line down the page of my monitor. They scrolled by past, but you could still read them.
There were all sorts of glitches in codes. He was using a Wang and I was using an IBM. They had different codes for italics, for bold, all that kind of thing. Even for paragraphing. We had to figure out little symbols to use in place of the ordinary symbols and inform the machine that those symbols were codes: italic, indent, etc.
After I wrote the whole thing, I'd then do a global search and replace for italic, quotation marks. And Steve would do a reverse global replace.
This time around, of course, it was much, much easier. It took seconds to send 100 pages through the Internet. It is vastly more convenient.
Black House tips its hat to Charles Dickens' Bleak House and The Talisman is a tribute to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Would you consider the series literary horror?
Straub: It does reflect that both of its authors have read a hell of a lot of books. We have certain tastes. Tom Sawyer meant a lot to both Steve and I when we were kids. Bleak House meant to a lot to us in our adulthood. Dickens in general had a big effect on Steve and myself. The title Black House is a deliberate reference to Bleak House. We sure as hell didn't try to hide it [laughs]. We even had one character read Bleak House to his best friend.
John Clute [writer and editor of The Encyclopedias of Fantasy and Science Fiction and columnist for Science Fiction Weekly] [said his] edition of Black House contained the same number of pages as the original first edition of Bleak House. He was sure it was intentional. Of course, it was a wonderful coincidence.
Koko has been a favorite of yours of your own works. What is it about that novel that you are still fond of?
Straub: I'm fond of the fact while I was writing it I knew I was going somewhere new. I had the strong feeling that my game had moved up to a new level. Nothing can be more rewarding if you write fiction all day long to feel that your work has mysteriously, internally improved. That book was emotionally richer than anything I had written before.
That had something to do with the stories "Blue Rose" and "The Juniper Tree" I wrote en route for Houses Without Doors. Those two stories were unlike anything I had written—I wrote them with tremendous concentration and a sense of absolute involvement. I loved them both much while I was doing it. I loved the activity. Those stories are very extreme, they are unpleasant, they force the reader to look at displeasing things very, very close-up. They are also written in such a way, to achieve a kind of transparency. I didn't want any stylistic tricks to fuzzy or interfere with the
transaction of the reader on the page.
I had to bring that antiseptic into Koko. It is a very demanding antiseptic. I had to revise everything many, many times in order to make the prose really clean and alive.
So that is another reason I like Koko, my writing there; although I've always been absurdly proud of my prose style, in that case it had finally grew up. I also thought my dialogue had gotten a lot better.
Any works in progress? What is in the future for Peter Straub?
Straub: I hope and I must believe there is another novel lurking out there [laughs]. [Pulls out little notebook.] What I have here in my hand, to quote Joe McCarthy, "is not a list of names" but a bunch of notes for a book with the working title of Queen of the Night.
I should have begun this a year ago, but I had to do a lot of PR for Black House. My collaborator decided to stay at home [laughs] and God bless him—I agreed to go out. I did a million book fairs and interviews and stuff like that. That meant I was really too busy, I'm not one of those writers who can write where he is. I need boredom, I need stillness, I need some kind of routine for my imagination to wake up.
Then September 11 slowed me down a great deal. It was very, very depressing. It was in the city
that I lived in. It had been very seriously wounded. And for a long time that wound was open. I couldn't forget the fact that three miles from me there was a big, big pile of corpses. This is the way horror writers think. The smell of dead bodies was in the air down there.
I emerged from that, because I had to. I had to write some introductions. That helped me get
back into the habit of stringing sentences together. It was a difficult thing. If you haven't done it for a while it is daunting. To make sentences link up, that don't fall over themselves and actually say
something. I wrote a very long introduction for a Larry Block book—which was about 20 pages.
Then I wrote an introduction for The Stepford Wives [by Ira Levin].
My friend Bradford Morrow, the editor of the literary journal called Conjunctions, asked me to guest edit an issue. He wanted me to get his favorite writers to write horror stories—an idea I felt was really repulsive. So I suggested that we do something a lot more interesting—bring together under one roof those writers who it seemed to me had begun to erase the boundaries in the genre-world. These writers who have since created really noteworthy, memorable books but whose names aren't known to the general public. This is a very nice Trojan Horse for everyone involved. All the writers who I talked to, who I approached, were immediately enthusiastic about it. What I'm doing is writing my story at the moment. I'm about halfway through my story for this issue. That Conjunctions issue should come out in the fall and is going to be called "The New Fabulous." The effect when we're done is a really good anthology, with these writers who are the forefront of post-genre writing.
When that is done, I will at last start seriously to begin on that novel that I carry around in a
notebook now. The novel in my pocket [laughs].
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