Suspenseful, slow-paced horror

Dear Reader,

On the first page we meet Don Wanderley with a little girl in his car. He kidnapped her. What for? He doesn't quite seem to know. And why is she so silent? Why doesn't she try to get away from him? Not a page into the story, that little girl started to give me the creeps. I was relieved when, after three chapters in that car, Peter Straub jumped backwards in time and began the novel proper.

It's a slow-paced horror novel full of detail and suspense. In the small town of Milburn, people die and cattle turns up bloodless. Old men tell each other ghost stories that might just be true. It takes 300 pages and many, many scary deaths until we find out how it all ties together. Even then, the good guys don't know what to do. They don't have a plan.

Straub's characters all feel real. Half of a little town parades over
the pages. We find out who drinks too much, who makes the best cheese in
the county, who would like to be friends with whom but doesn't know how
to approach them. The people of Milburn are people. And something's
killing them.

The pace got a little too slow for my taste there in the second half. For chapters and chapters, I was wondering if Peter Straub would just let the monsters kill people until Milburn was empty. But each new scene held me with its tension. Because sometimes, somebody gets away. Sometimes, they make it out of a house full of monsters alive. And sometimes, someone dies when I believed they were still too important to the story.

Eventually, we come back to the beginning, back to Donald Wanderley and a little girl. Then, things happen fast.

You'll enjoy Ghost Story if you like a slow pace with dozens of fleshed-out characters. Peter Straub writes like a Stephen King with even more people.

Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

first published in 1989

Several editions available on Amazon.co.uk.