In early September of 2022, when I heard that the horror writer Peter Straub had died, it was like a hole had opened up beneath my feet. Anyone who’s ever felt close to a writer, a musician, a movie star, through their work, can probably relate to the strange grief that comes when you hear one of them is gone. To me, it’s like a grief I don’t have the right to, not compared to those who may have actually known the person, yet I’ve felt compelled to explore the sense of loss by celebrating that person’s work. I worry it’s a selfish kind of grief, centered around myself rather than the person. And yet it stems from a place of gratitude, and comes with the desire to talk about it, to write about it, to honor them in the only ways I know how.
With the news of Peter Straub, I was struck by returning memories of being a teenager newly hungry for horror literature in the small town of Mount Shasta, California. I remembered—with the clarity of an actual flashback—walking into Mount Shasta’s old used bookstores: how I always went straight to the horror or genres section and scanned always for two names: Stephen King and Peter Straub. This is a habit that has never faded. When I walk into a used bookstore today, my destination is Horror if they have a section for it, or genre broadly, and the names I check first are King and Straub.
This grief struck me in three distinct ways. There was the realization that those bookstores in my memories aren’t there anymore, in Mount Shasta. There was that simpler time in my life, even though, at the time, it didn’t feel simple at all. There was the connection I had always felt to Peter Straub’s writing, and how much I had come to respect him as an artist and as a person.
On that day in September, I walked around without any real destination, feeling weird, feeling sad, feeling empty. I went to my bookshelves, gathered all the old paperbacks I had of Straub’s books—nearly all of which I’d accumulated in my teen years, in those old used bookstores in Mount Shasta—and I spent a long time flipping through the ones I’d read. Those I had read, they’d impacted and influenced me immensely. It’s hard to understate what it was like discovering an author of his stature, especially for a young and developing writer like me. There was also plenty I hadn’t yet read, which I’d always told myself I would when I felt ready. Hearing that Straub was gone turned this intention into another layer of grief. What had taken me so long to come back? To read the ones I’d meant to all this time?
Stephen King’s IT was my introduction to adult horror literature. I have my dad to thank for that wonderful trauma. Thanks to a few choice films and the realization that I really liked what horror did to me, my dad suggested I look into an author called Stephen King. So I found a copy of IT, a black paperback with an illustration of Tim Curry’s glaring Pennywise on the cover. From then on, I was set on fire. Despite how deeply his books scarred me, I wanted more. It was like coming home. A lot of free time and extra money went into three destinations in the small town of Mount Shasta: Village Books, which sold new books; Book Nook, which got so much of my business; and the library and their for sale section, where I found many hardcover treasures, rarely for more than a dollar or two. These stores were small, limited; often there wasn’t much. But over time, it was enough. It was, more than anything, wonderful.
I can still remember how I’d post updates on social media of my growing Stephen King collection. Fourteen books. A couple weeks later, up to seventeen. My god, a milestone of twenty-five!
I haven’t counted my number of Stephen King books in a long time, or books in general, but it’d be… well, a lot more than twenty-five.
My horror shelves were my happy places at home. Sometimes, a hard day could be reasonably improved when I got home, went to my room, turned on some music, and stood in front of my bookshelves. I rearranged them constantly, read and reread blurbs I found to be especially exciting, studied opening lines and certain scenes, sometimes for hours. I did this with Stephen King at first. Then I discovered GHOST STORY, by Peter Straub, which I consider my first brush with the deep literary side of horror. I was caught between appreciating the language, rereading scenes, and pushing forward as the story grew more propulsive. And so, Straub became as much a fascination, a subject of study, as Stephen King.
Back then, what I craved most from the writing I consumed was a sense of voice and flow. A rhythm. That’s what drew me to those writers: they had voice and flow in spades. The music of the language, the expansiveness and darkness of the imagination, the humanity of the characters. The main difference was the challenge that Straub’s work presented. King’s books lingered with me, his characters and their journeys and their experiences, and Straub’s books did the same for similar reasons, with the added bonus that I was fully aware of not grasping all of Straub’s tricks. I still feel that way about his work: there’s so much more to grasp, the layers, the forms, the sleights-of-hand, the hidden meanings.
I also watched interviews and talks from King and Straub over and over again, something I still sometimes do. To hear a true master speak about their genre, it is an education itself. Straub’s words on the nature of darkness, of the depths of horror and human nature, they inspire me constantly.
Other authors would follow, of course. Richard Matheson, Dan Simmons, Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman.
What’s strange to me is looking back at how these writers shaped my own early writing. I’m not particularly good at seeing my own writing from an objective point of view—I feel it’s probably that way with most writers—but the influence of King was obvious. More subtle, perhaps, was the influence of Straub.
There’s something distinct I feel when I’m wrapped up in the writing of Peter Straub. I remember it clearly, being about fifteen, and how much Straub’s writing made me want to write. I experience synesthesia with a few things, mostly with sounds and words. To me, songs are colorful experiences in my head, and it’s the same with words. It’s not something I’m always conscious of because it’s so normal to me, since it’s always been that way throughout my life. When I do pay attention to it, though, it’s fascinating to me how vivid the experience of those colors can be. When it comes to reading or writing, it’s nearly indistinguishable from my perception of the rhythm and flow of words. Along with those things, there are the colors. I say all this to try and communicate the effect that writing like Straub’s has on my mind. It’s an immersion not only in the story, but in the words themselves, the flourishes of language which inspired me as a writer back then, and continues to today.
For a time, however, I sort of left horror behind. I stepped away from it. In retrospect, I don’t even really know why. And although I’m glad for this, I’ve also sort of “come back” to horror in my mid-to-late twenties, about which I’m all the more glad. It was always there, how I gravitated toward darkness in what I watched, read, or wrote, but it stopped being my focus, my genre, for a long time.
For all that I love horror films, my favorite films tend to be other genres. In books, my other love other than horror is largely literary fiction. And I can be annoyingly picky.
A few years passed in which horror fell to the background, and I read and also wrote all different kinds of things, leaning toward the side of literary fiction. I fell in love with poetry. My writing continued to evolve as I discovered favorite writers of different varieties and mediums.
I agree with anyone who says to expand one’s horizons, to read widely, to introduce yourself to things you’re unfamiliar with, no matter what that means. But, for awhile, I almost feel as though I went too far away from horror; I say this only because, when I finally came back to it, I genuinely missed it. It felt like I’d rediscovered a forgotten part of myself. This probably sounds dramatic, but that’s how it felt for me.
In 2020, I wrote THE FAMILY CONDITION, the first time in years I’d tried to write horror. Again, it felt like coming home. It also felt drastically different from the last time I’d written in the horror genre, mostly because it couldn’t simply be called “horror” in a straightforward sense. This is something I’ve come to embrace about my writing, probably because I learned it from my favorite writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub. Horror opens a door, it doesn’t close it, in terms of genre. It opens the possibility of exploring aspects of the human experience that other genres won’t go to. And yet, horror also encompasses so many other experiences and genres. So, THE FAMILY CONDITION, for example, is a horror novel, but it’s a love story, a story of sacrifice and connection and meaning and monsters. And the books I’ve written since then, I’m happy for them for everything they are, while also being horror.
I wrote this blog post because, currently, I’ve been reading a lot of Peter Straub. I started by revisiting his last novel, A DARK MATTER, a multilayered work that largely flew over my head when I first read it. Now I’m halfway through IN THE NIGHT ROOM, one of the number I’ve never read before. And it fills me up, it amazes me, while touching that place of strange grief. It reminds me of why I fell in love with the possibilities of writing, of what can be done with language and storytelling. It reminded me of why I ever gravitated to this great writer’s inimitable work. And it connected me with parts of myself, and parts of my past, I don’t often think about anymore. Not even consciously, when I step into a used bookstore however far away from those bookstores I grew up visiting, and when I find the horror section and my eyes search instinctively—above all others—for the name KING and the name STRAUB.
There are so many writers I will feel forever grateful for, past and present. The ones that shaped me back then, and the ones that shape me now. But those two voices are intertwined with my relationship to horror in the purest sense. I just wanted to take this time to talk about that, to let some of this out.
Thank you for your time, if you’ve read this. It was a personal journey, but hopefully worth it for you, too.