John C. Tibbetts - The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

All drawings and paintings throughout the book are by John C. Tibbetts.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2733-5

2016 John C. Tibbetts. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: (inset) Peter Straub illustration by John C. Tibbets; background image by The Power of Forever Photography

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

What do you feel? What do you see? Wonderful things, right? Extraordinary shows? Isnt this very beautiful? And terrible? And very dangerous?

Charles Baudelaire, Thtre de Sraphim (1860)

My thanks, above all, to Peter Straub. Peter, I wish all readers of your works could know firsthand your kindness and sometimes antic humor. Your patience, moreover, with my many pesky questions in person, by letter, and on the phone has made this experience a particular pleasure. Your inspiration has also gotten me to revisit the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. And to Stephen King, your patience with my persistent requests for an interview is greatly appreciated. Your respect and affection for Peter and his work is something very special indeed! And to William SheehanBill, this book would not have been possible without your generous support and assistance every step of the way. Your At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub (2000) is an important, groundbreaking study that ably combines biographical detail with insightful commentaries on the novels and stories. Undeservedly out of print, it ranks among the best serious studies of writers and writing and belongs on the shelf of every Gothic enthusiast. My thanks to that redoubtable historian of all things weird and uncanny, S. T. Joshi, who first suggested this project. To Emily King and Rachel Greer, with the Fales Archive at New York University (fales.library@nyu.ed), where Peter Straubs papers are stored, goes my gratitude for your help in accessing for me the many boxes of files and photographs during my research trip to New York. I highly recommend this valuable resource, which is open to the serious scholar. Thanks to Ron Harris and his wife, Lila, who put me up during that trip. And to members of the Straub familySusan Straub, thanks for an inspiring conversation about your wonderful Read to Me program; Benjamin Straub, I am grateful for your correspondence and we all hope that your efforts to bring Peters work to film and television will continue. To Emma, I hope that we may meet soon; meantime, you have a new baby to bring up! Thanks go to Francis Nevins for reading the manuscript and to Stephen Kings agent Chuck Verrill for facilitating the interview with King. Others who have taken their time to read and comment on the progress of this book include Peters good friends and colleagues Thomas Tessier, Ramsey Campbell, Jack Ketchum, William F. Nolan, and Gary K. Wolfe. Among other correspondents and readers, Michael Dirda, T.E.D. Klein, Jon Eller, Cynthia J. Miller, Bev Vincent, Brian Faucette, Barbara Goebel, Jason and Sunni Brock, Frank Thompson, and Josh and Stephi Wille have been very helpful. To Paula Courtney, Pam LeRow, and Elizabeth Stevens of the University of Kansas, I am grateful for your assistance in transcribing and formatting this manuscript. And my thanks go to my supportive colleagues in the Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Kansas, including Michael Baskett, department chair, Karla Conrad, executive secretary, Tamara Falicov, Madison Davis Lacey, Catherine Preston, Kevin Willmott, Germaine Halegoua, Robert Hurst, and Cathy Joritz. Finally, as always, my heartfelt appreciations to my partner, Mary Lou Pagano: You have patiently endured the stresses and strains of my writing this book. Thank you, my LuLu. Where would this book be without your love and wise counsel?

by Gary K. Wolfe

It has been said, at various times and in various ways, that writers create their own antecedents. This is a somewhat more complex idea than Harold Blooms much-discussed anxiety of influence and it is of particular relevance to writers who are associated with genre literature. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction writers have habitually sought to recommission earlier traditions in the service of lending historical gravitas to genres which are seen as having unfairly fallen off the radar of literary respectability; fantasy advocates want to reach back before Tolkien to find noble ancestors in medieval romances, or indeed in the entire scope of world mythology. Science fiction readers like to cite the speculative aspects of utopian or dystopian fiction from Plato to Aldous Huxley, along with fanciful speculations of space voyages from Lucian of Samosata to Jules Verne. Horror finds its forbears in folktales and legends as well as in Gothic romances and even fin de sicle decadence. But despite such genealogical ambitions, a more modest consensus history seems to persist among readers: modern science fiction begins with Verne and Wells, modern fantasy with Tolkien, modern horror with Poe and Lovecraft.

Such consensus histories can be useful in cementing a sense of continuity and community, but they can also promote a kind of tunnel vision in terms of a genres history and of its possibilities. None of the major genres of fantastic literature are lacking in authors who are cheerfully content to work within those historical parameters, to color within the lines. For such writers, some of them excellent, fiction can become largely a matter of performance and repertoire rather than of testing boundaries or pursuing a unique artistic vision, and thanks to them, the core traditions of horror, fantasy, or science fictionand, for that matter, of mysteries or romancescan remain vital from generation to generation, satisfying readers who know exactly what they want with, well, exactly what they want.

And then there are writers like Peter Straub, who does not hesitate to challenge his substantial base of loyal readers, expanding not only the available literary materials of his chosen mode, but also its future possibilities. I sometimes think of writers like Straub as fulcrums, key points on which an entire genre may pivot, leading to unexpected results and to unexpected negotiations with literary tradition. There are perhaps one or two such writers in a generation in a given genre. In 1960s science fiction, for example, writers like John Brunner and J.G. Ballard showed how the modernist or postmodernist techniques of John Dos Passos and William Burroughs could inform a new kind of science fiction, and the later impact of New Wave science fiction extended well beyond what had previously been viewed as the borders of the genre. Still earlier, writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald had redefined the mystery genre in a manner that incorporated elements of classic American realism, and what followed became an entire mode of narrative, sometimes conveniently labeled