Is "Ghost Story" a Ghost Story?

I'd never read anything by Peter Straub before, and I was curious about what type of story this novel would be to actually be called Ghost Story. My copy began with excerpts from reviews describing it as a terrifying novel that would give me nightmares no matter how many ghost stories I've read before.

As I read Ghost Story, I began to wonder if those reviewers were talking about a different book.

Warning: this review will include spoilers. If you haven't read Peter Straub's Ghost Story and don't want to know about key revelations and plot events, turn back now.

My main issue with the novel is that it wasn't scary. In fact, it wasn't particularly interesting. The prologue was good, and made me want to know more about this man and the mysterious girl he kidnapped for reasons unknown. But once we hit the main story, I lost interest in it until around the 300-page mark, when things started happening in the story's present. If it takes 300 pages for me to become interested... well, I probably wouldn't have stuck with this one if it wasn't for class.

The pacing issues didn't end there, either. After a while, it felt like it was dragging on--like we should have hit the climax and ending already, but instead we had to plod through more scenes to get there. Once the antagonist really started picking off characters, I expected more action, less huge paragraphs of exposition. Throughout the books, the ones I dreaded the most were what I thought of as the "and" chapters, where there would be paragraph after paragraph summarizing events, each starting with "and" while jumping to a new character.

Speaking of the characters, I hated them. For example, when they didn't seem to comprehend that Milly Sheehan would be upset about Jaffrey--come on, I know they didn't realize she was in a relationship with him, but they couldn't even believe his housekeeper would be concerned about more than the "disproportionate amount of money" (169) he left her?--or when Don explained that as soon as he met Alma, she was "already more important" (213) than his then-girlfriend, I found myself wondering how I was supposed to care about the fates of these idiots.

To be fair to Don, Alma probably had him under her spell by then, but there's no excuse for the rest of the cast to be a bunch of jerks.

Peter wasn't a jerk, but he wasn't very interesting, either.

One last thing about the characters--there were too many names. A large cast of characters, along with antagonists who use multiple identities, were introduced too close together. Some of the minor characters I lost track of several times, and I'm not sure if the revelation that Eva Galli was another incarnation of the antagonist was supposed to be a twist or not. I backtracked through the pages to try to find out if they'd already said who she was, gave up, and just assumed she was that same woman.

I liked the general idea of Eva/Anna/Alma/etc. There was great horror potential in the spooky woman connected to each of them, responsible for the death's of people in their pasts, always there in every story, under a different name.

Then it complicated matters by becoming Alan Wake.


There were enough similarities I wondered if Alan Wake was inspired in part by this element of Ghost Story. I couldn't find anything to confirm it, but they have many things in common: the plot being influenced by "occurrences from an unwritten book" (316), the antagonist's ability to warp reality, the attempt to trick the protagonists into believing they imagined it all, and the main antagonist being an evil force in a dead woman's body with the ability to resurrect and control the dead.
But even if the stuff from Don's book entering reality seemed to serve no purpose except to make the plot more complicated, it was the last revelation that made the antagonist stop working for me.
In class, we talked about subtle horror versus blatant horror. One idea that came up was how some things lose what makes them frightening when you understand them. This book proves the concept for me. I would have been so much happier if we never really knew what the villain was. As soon as Don revealed she was a shape-shifter, it lost me. Eva/Alma/Anna was much scarier before I knew she could turn into a lynx.
Not only that, but she and her kind are the origin of all ghost, vampire, werewolf, zombie, whatever stories? No, no, no no no.
Maybe it's because the title made me expect a ghost story. Maybe it's because, in a story where not a lot of interesting things happened, the creepy ghost lady held my interest. Whatever it is, the truth about her made me cringe, and it was just one more reason to hope for the end of a story that had already gone on far too long.
When I finally did reach the end, it wasn't satisfying. I realized early on that Don would survive, because the novel had to circle around to reach the prologue. I expected a dark ending from there, a hint that the cycle would continue forever.
And once we reached that ending, it still wasn't over. It continued on to finish things forever, but after numerous false climaxes where our protagonists fought these deadly foes, Don cutting a wasp to pieces just wasn't enough payoff to make the ending worthwhile... especially for something called "Ghost Story."