The essence of horror fiction is fear of the unknown. What made Peter Straub, who has died aged 79, so successful as a horror writer was his understanding that this unknown is at heart a reflection of the deeper unknowns all people face.
His bestseller Ghost Story (1979), which was made into a 1981 film starring Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Melvyn Douglas, is informed by the reflection of the living that is provided by the dead. This can sometimes be funny, not in a macabre way; one thinks of Thorne Smith’s Topper stories, where the ghosts who haunt Cosmo Topper’s house try to liberate him from his own personality, and a handful of famous films from the golden age of Hollywood. Straub wrote of his own turn “toward the dark and garish” and discovering his own “first effect” when he found he “could make this kind of thing funny”.
Straub’s use of his insights was amplified by the quality of his prose. One of his early influences was Henry James, whose The Turn of the Screw is one of the greatest ghost stories, but he would also cite many other classic novelists, as well as poets such as John Ashbery and William Carlos Williams. There was always the sense of his reluctance to be pigeonholed as a “genre” novelist. Stephen King, with whom Straub collaborated on two novels, called him “a modern writer who was the equal of, say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things”. What was unsaid was that Roth wrote about such things too; his late bestseller The Plot Against America is a classic alternate-history science-fiction novel.
The core of Straub’s writing might be found in his early years. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; his father, Gordon, was a salesman, his mother, Elvina (nee Nilsestuen), was a nurse. At the age of seven Peter was hit by a car and injured so severely he had to relearn how to walk after spending a year in a wheelchair. He developed a stutter that he eventually managed to control, most of the time. He later wrote that since he had learned prematurely that the world was dangerous, he was jumpy, restless and hugely garrulous, in spite of his stutter.
He was a prodigious reader, and bright enough to win a scholarship to Milwaukee country day school, from where he went on to take a BA in English in 1965 from the University of Wisconsin, followed by an MA from Columbia University in New York City the following year. Then he returned to Milwaukee, married his college sweetheart, Susan Bitker, in 1966, and began teaching English at his old school.
In 1969 they left for Dublin, where Peter worked on a PhD at University College. His dissertation on DH Lawrence was never completed, but he met another expat American, Thomas Tessier, who would also become a horror writer. Their small press, Seafront, published his first book of poetry, My Life in Pictures, in 1971.
Moving to London, Straub published two more poetry chapbooks, Ishmael from Bernard Stone’s Turret Books and Open Air from Irish University Press. He was astounded to have his first novel, Marriages, accepted by the first publisher he sent it to, and published in 1973. Another, Under Venus, followed in 1974. He continued writing poetry; in 1983 the science fiction publisher Underwood-Miller issued Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970-75.
But neither poetry nor mainstream fiction had been lucrative, and he decided he “just wanted to write a novel that would make money, so I wouldn’t have to get a job”. That was Julia (1975), about a woman haunted by a ghost she thinks is her daughter. It came along at a good time, as the horror genre moved into the mainstream, with bestsellers such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen and King’s Carrie, which appeared in 1974. In 1977 the British director Richard Loncraine made Julia into a film, The Haunting of Julia, with Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea and Tom Conti.
If You Could See Me Now was published the same year, followed by Ghost Story (whose filmed screenplay was written by Lawrence Cohen, who also did the screenplay of Carrie), which became a bestseller. In 1979 Straub moved back to the US, first to Westport, Connecticut, and then to New York City, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1983 novel Floating Dragon won the British Fantasy award but, after collaborating with King on The Talisman (1984), which was also a huge seller, Straub began moving away from horror, though the horror field was not quite ready to let him leave.
The first of his Blue Rose trilogy, Koko (1988) won the World Fantasy award; it was followed by Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993), which won the Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers Association. About a 10-year old boy who survives a near-fatal accident and becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder, the trilogy is more mystery thriller than horror fantasy. After another thriller, The Hellfire Club (1996), and the offbeat Pork Pie Hat (1999), set among jazz musicians, in the next decade he produced four novels, all of which won Stoker awards, as well as a sequel to Talisman, Black House (2001), again with King. Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2004) won both the Stoker and World Fantasy awards.
Throughout this time Straub was also writing short stories and proved an able anthologist; in the end he was awarded four World Fantasy and 10 Stoker awards. He was keen on the camaraderie of writers; he revelled in fan conventions the same way he had felt in the pubs of London or Dublin. His daughter Emma, who became a novelist, eulogised him as “Big Pete”, and wrote of the joy he took in interacting with others.
It reminded me of his moving 2012 remembrance of the fantasy writer Karl Edward Wagner. He described how Wagner, who drank himself to an early death, “to an extent well beyond the usual human capacity, even as represented by most fiction-writers, and it now seems to me to an extent so drastically uncomfortable as to be painful … was able to see what was actually before him”. In his own way, Straub’s strength was his ability to transmute what he saw before us into less fatal discomfort.
Straub died of complications from a broken hip suffered in a fall. He is survived by Susan, Emma, and his son, Benjamin.
• Peter Francis Straub, writer and poet, born 2 March 1943; died 4 September 2022
