Ghost Story

This is my first read by Straub and what a ride it was. There were highs and lows, but despite everything I was so sucked in to this story that I declined game night with my husband because I had to find out what was going on. The horror in this one was visceral, palpable, and perpetual, though for modern standards I found it tolerable and have read more nightmare-inducing stories. There's a long long list of TWs applicable which I've tried to list down at the end of this review but do your own research too just in case I missed out on anything.

We open the book with a character Don Wanderley whom we know nothing about and he seems to be escorting or kidnapping a child. Whatever we may have felt about Don, we soon also realize that the little girl is... creepier than him. The book then flashes back to the Chowder Society, a group of four aged men who have been long time residents of the small, rural town of Milburn, New York. They gather every few weeks to tell each other ghost stories as a way of coping when one of their number, Edward Wanderley, mysteriously passed away close to a gear ago. It becomes abundantly clear that the Chowder Society has a ton of secrets of their own, and a persistent evil seems to have revisited Milburn.

Let me first talk about the writing. I can see the author's writing as being rather polarizing. It's got a hazy, nebulous quality to it, and can often meander and go into over-description. But it kinda works for this book, as interested as it is in dreams, nightmare, and imagination. In tandem with the fact that this book has some of the longest chapters I've ev

The horror in itself was pretty well done. There were supernatural entities that kept you guessing - Were they tangible? Were they harmable? Were they just figments of the imagination? As the book goes on, worse and worse things happen until the stakes almost go unbearably high. The only thing you can really be sure of is that mysterious prologue you read at the beginning and the one character in it - but even then you're not 100% sure because the book undermines reality a lot. Hallucination and imagination is interweaved and you can never really be sure if the scene you're reading is reality.

In terms of characters, there isn't really one that particularly stuck out to me as a favorite. In fact, I got confused between the side characters a lot because everyone had the same generic names, and I have a feeling this was very much on purpose. In large gatherings where we have name after name being mentioned doing this and that, everyone just started blending together and we can't differentiate bodies in the crowd anymore, and I think this adds to that dreamlike quality of the story, where everyone sort of has a face but also doesn't. Of course, this doesn't apply so much to our Chowder Society members and the couple of people they eventually enlist to help them confront what's threatening them.

Spoilery thoughts: This book would've been 5 stars but I thought the horror dampened a bit after we kinda get a better idea of what Eva Galli was. When it's explained point blank that she's some kind of shapeshifter, the horror kinda loses the enigma that is what kept it horrifying in the first place, and it almost becomes like a magical realism novel or fantasy. I was less engaged in the very last chapter than I had been for the rest of the book, which is odd considering it was meant to be the climax.I also didn't like that Galli didn't seem to have a solid motive to be haunting these men, aside from being akin to a hunter hunting prey for sport and then ramping up the hunt when it felt insulted by them. I had initially thought that Galli was a real woman who had been possibly sexually assaulted and murdered by the Chowder Society and was now coming back for vengeance, but it didn't turn out to be the case. That seems to he her very first appearance in the Milburn circle so there really doesn't seem to be any solid motivation for her moving there or deciding to terrorize the people there.The characterization of women in this book also left much to be desired. I can't think of one we spend significant time with that wasn't overly sexualized with voracious sexual appetites, and that included Eva Galli herself. In Galli's case she's an actual demon or some kind of evil supernatural being, while in the cases of Christina Barnes, Penny Draeger, and even Viola Fredrickson, they all wind up dead (the former two notably at the hands of male apparitions and in the midst of something like a date or attempting to meet an extramarital partner). It's a miracle that Stella Hawthorne only almost dies, I was pretty sure she was going to be killed spectacularly. There seems to be some kind of anxiety or preoccupation here with women confident of and comfortable with their sexuality that they need to be demonized or killed. It's also notable that none of the married men in Milburn are unfaithful as far as I can remember, and it's always the women and wives who are sexually insatiable.

Nevertheless, this was overall a really good and enjoyable read for me and entirely in line with Spooktober and the coming end of year season.

Trigger warnings: Child abuse (physical and sexual), murder, mutilation, suicide, body horror, drug abuse, animal death, infidelity