A note about Peter Straub
This is the very brief (alas, the space limitations I was given) piece I wrote about Peter for the HWA program book, mentioned in my April post here.
Thomas Tessier
Way, way back, in the first year of the very entertaining Nixon presidency, I was living in Dublin, Ireland. I’d been a college student there a couple of years earlier and I loved the city. It had a lively literary scene and a certain raffish, seedy charm — poets going from pub to pub, selling badly printed broadsheets for a half crown, other writers who carried typescripts of every single thing they’d ever written (so far) around with them in plastic laundry bags. It wasn’t the Paris of the 1920s, but it was the Dublin of Yeats, Joyce and J.P. Donleavy, and the written word was sacred.
There are those rare times when life does you an unexpected favor, and on a distant Tuesday night in Dublin, it did me a big one. The Pembroke pub, just off Fitzwilliam Square, had poetry readings every Tuesday. I was there on one such occasion, chatting with a sometime poet and amateur publisher I knew — a bit of a shambler, in fact — who drew my attention to a tall, bearded feller seated on the other side of the room and told me I ought to meet him. “He’s another Yank poet living here, like yerself.”
I noticed the other Yank again later, at closing time, as we were all leaving the premises, and I introduced myself to him. His name was Peter Straub and he was from Milwaukee, by way of Columbia University. It turned out we were neighbors, living just a couple of streets apart. We became fast friends, and in the weeks and months that followed, the best of friends. We would get together once or twice a week, sometimes more often, showing each other the latest we had written, praising, criticizing, analyzing, celebrating when one of us had something accepted for publication or commiserating over rejections, or just talking about books, jazz, Nixon, jazz, and life its ownself. Not always in a pub, I wish to emphasize.
Peter sold his first novel and he and Susie moved to London. We stayed in touch by mail, and a year or so later the publishing company I worked for in Dublin offered me a job in their London office. Alice and I jumped at the chance. One day Peter and I met for a pint and he talked about writing a horror novel, “a Gothic.” He gave me a verbal outline of the story he had in mind, and I was knocked out by it. The only useful thing I could say was, “You have to kill her.” Soon, I was traipsing about Kensington with him, staring at buildings and streets and views while he took notes, until he found exactly the house he wanted to use as his focal setting, on Ilchester Place. The novel was JULIA. Some months later, when I read the finished manuscript, I was knocked out all over again — tenfold.
IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW soon followed, and when I read the first couple of hundred pages of GHOST STORY in manuscript, I felt dizzy. The man was no longer writing precise songs, he was ripping out vast, intricate symphonies from the darkest, most painful corners of the heart. I don’t need to tell you the rest, you know that book and all the brilliant novels and stories that have followed since.
A long time ago, in a dark pub in Southampton Row in London, Peter talked about writing horror in a way that was faithful to its vital spirit but also took it in new directions, beyond its genre conventions. He has succeeded magnificently in doing exactly that, giving us a dazzling body of work that is true to both horror and literary art, that is remorseless, uncompromising and yet somehow deeply consoling — which is why we love it so much.
