Ghost Story

Ghost Story is the best American ghost novel of the twentieth century and it is mostly about guilt, male friendship and the specific cowardice of respectable men.

The Chowder Society is five lawyers and doctors in Milburn who meet in dinner jackets to drink and tell each other frightening stories. Straub's structure keeps them at the centre and lets the horror accumulate around them: one of them dies at a party in the first pages, the survivors begin having the same dream, a novelist nephew arrives with his own account of a woman who was not a woman, and the town starts to go wrong by degrees — a farmer's livestock, a boy who will not come home, a snowfall that does not stop.

The writing is the reason it lasts. Straub is a far more careful stylist than the horror bestseller list of 1979 would suggest: the prose is cool, slightly formal, and willing to spend a chapter on an old man's memory of a face. Milburn is one of the best-realised towns in the genre and the novel is genuinely interested in what fifty years of shared silence does to four friendships.

It is a novel about telling stories, and it means it structurally

Ghost stories are told inside it constantly — by the Society, by the nephew in his own manuscript, in a long middle section set fifty years earlier — and the book's monsters are explicitly made out of what people imagine. The novel's position is that the shapeshifters take the shapes human beings have given them, which is why they arrive as the figures from the stories the men have been telling, and why the only weapon that works is attention.

The 1929 section is the best part

Eva Galli's death, told at length in the middle of the novel, is as good as anything in American horror: five young men, a party, a scuffle, a woman on the floor, a decision made in panic, a car rolled into a pond, and a face at the rear window as it goes under. Everything in the present-day plot is the bill for that evening, and the novel is unsentimental about the fact that what they were protecting was their careers.

Where it is hard going

It is long and the structure is deliberately fractured — three parts, multiple narrators, a manuscript inside the novel, flashbacks inside flashbacks — and readers looking for forward motion find the first two hundred pages slow. The Bate brothers are more effective as a threat than as characters. And the final confrontation, which runs through a derelict cinema and a hotel, is less frightening than the middle of the book.

For the ghost novel Straub is writing in the tradition of, The Haunting of Hill House; for the same Southern-Gothic family debt coming due, The Elementals; for the same town closing around something, Pet Sematary.

The short answer: the entity has been working through a succession of women — Alma Mobley, who destroyed Don Wanderley's life; Anna Mostyn, who arrives in Milburn claiming to be Eva Galli's niece; and, fifty years earlier, Eva Galli herself. It is not a ghost. The novel calls its kind Manitou: shapeshifters who have been taken for vampires and werewolves and whatever else the people of a given century had available, and who assume the shapes human imagination hands them. The Chowder Society did not kill a woman in 1929; they attacked one of these things, failed, and gave it a grievance. It is served by Gregory and Fenny Bate, two dead brothers. By the climax most of the Society is dead and Milburn has been emptied. Don Wanderley, the teenager Peter Barnes and Ricky Hawthorne — the last of the five — hunt it down, kill the Bate brothers in a brutal fight at the old Rialto theatre, and corner the Galli creature; Peter stabs it, but it escapes in the form of a bird. The novel's frame, which opens the book, is the aftermath: Don travelling with a young girl who is the thing returned in a new identity. He ends that identity, and he kills the creature itself in its last form — a wasp, held in his hand.

What did the Chowder Society do in 1929?

Five young men — Sears James, Ricky Hawthorne, Lewis Benedikt, John Jaffrey and Edward Wanderley — were at Eva Galli's house for an evening when a scuffle broke out and she was knocked down and appeared to be dead. Terrified of the scandal and of what it would do to their prospects, they put her body into a car and ran it into a pond. As it sank, they saw her face at the rear window, looking at them. All five spent the next fifty years not discussing it, and the Chowder Society's custom of telling ghost stories is what they do instead.

What are the shapeshifters in Ghost Story?

Beings the novel names Manitou, which are not ghosts, not demons and not undead. They are ancient, they recur across history under whatever name a culture has for them — vampire, werewolf, revenant — and they take their forms from human imagination, which is why they keep appearing as figures out of stories. The novel's most frightening implication is that the Chowder Society's lifelong habit of telling each other ghost stories has been supplying the vocabulary.

Who is Alma Mobley?

The woman Don Wanderley fell in love with and nearly married, and the subject of the novel he wrote afterwards. She is the same entity that was Eva Galli and that arrives in Milburn as Anna Mostyn — the names are an anagram family, which the book expects you to notice. Don's manuscript about her, included inside the novel, is both the evidence that brings him to Milburn and the clearest account of what the creature does to a person it has decided to ruin.

Who are Gregory and Fenny Bate?

Two brothers, long dead, who serve the shapeshifter and do the physical work: a predatory older brother and a small, pathetic, barefoot younger one who is the most unsettling figure in the book. They are killed at the Rialto in the novel's most violent sequence, and the detail that Fenny has to be destroyed rather than defeated is the point at which the novel stops being a ghost story and becomes something closer to a war.

How does Ghost Story end?

With a wasp. After the Rialto, the creature escapes as a bird, and the novel's frame picks up with Don Wanderley travelling with a child who is the thing in its newest shape. He ends that shape, and then kills the creature itself in its final, reduced form, which he is holding in his hand on the last page. The structure is a closed loop: the opening chapters of the book are the last events chronologically.

Is Ghost Story like the 1981 film?

Barely. The film keeps the Chowder Society, the drowning and Alma Mobley, drops the Manitou cosmology, the Bate brothers, the town's destruction and Don's manuscript, and resolves it as a straightforward revenge haunting. The novel is three times as long and considerably stranger.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 060 leans towards dream logic — 66 works score lower. The shared dream, the shapeshifting, the nested manuscripts and the closed-loop frame all refuse a stable account.

Tone 018 is bleak — 47 works score lower. Four of the five friends die, a town's population is killed, and the one survivor of the original group ends the book old and alone.

Viscera 044 is just under the median — 51 works score lower. Livestock mutilation, two very violent deaths at the theatre, several bodies, and a drowning.

Era bias 018 is deep analog — only 31 works score lower. A 1979 novel split between 1929 and the late seventies, with no technology beyond a car, a telephone and a typewriter.

Pace 024 is slow — 29 works are slower. The first third is dinners, memories and a town being described.

The threat at 040 is on the supernatural side — 54 works score lower, though the novel insists that the original crime was entirely human and entirely ordinary.

On shocks: a handful. The novel's worst moment is a face at a car window, and it has no competition.