Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

This would seem a valid enough course for the novel to follow to any people who see uses in the study of history, you would think, but the gothic novel has always been considered something of a curiosity, a widget on the great machine of English-speaking fiction. Straub's first two novels seem to me to be mostly unconscious attempts to do something with this widget; what distinguishes Ghost Story and makes it such a success is that with this book, Straub seems to have grasped exactly-consciously-what the gothic romance is about, and how it relates to the rest of literature. Put another way, he has discovered what the widget was supposed to do, and Ghost Story is a vastly entertaining manual of operation.

"[ Ghost Story ] started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find," Straub says. "I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of Lovecraft and a lot of books by his 'set'-this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the field-I also read Bierce, Edith Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot of Europeans . . . . The first thing I thought of was having a bunch of old men tell stories to each other-and then I hoped I could think of some device that would link all the stories. I very much like the idea of stories set down in novels-a lot of my life seems to have been spent listening to older people tell me stories about their families, their youth, all the rest. And it seemed like a formal challenge. After that I thought of cannibalizing certain old classic stories, and plugging them into the Chowder Society. This idea excited me. It seemed very audacious, and I thought that was very good. So I went ahead, after I got to that point in the book, and wrote junked-up versions of "My Kinsman, Major Molyneux," The Turn of the Screw , and started on "The Fall of the House of Usher." But by then the lead-in threatened to become the whole book. So I dropped the Poe story (the Hawthorne story came out when I edited the first draft). I was thinking at the time that the Chowder Society would follow these with their own stories-Lewis's monologue about the death of his wife, Sears and Ricky splitting a monologue (trading fours, in a way) about the death of Eva Galli.” The first striking thing about Ghost Story is its resemblance to Julia. That book begins with a woman who has lost a child; Ghost Story begins with a man who has found one. But these two children are eerily similar, and there is an atmosphere of evil about both of them.

From Julia: Almost immediately, she saw the blonde girl again.