A Horror World Conversation with Peter Straub
By Steven E. Wedel

Peter Straub. Some 20 years ago I never would have believed I’d have the chance to interview the author of some of my favorite novels. Here’s a guy who was writing with depth and subtlety at the height of the splatterpunk movement. His characters are so real and complex that they seem to somehow get all tangled up with the reader’s DNA so that when the story’s over you feel like something has been torn out of your own body.

The best of two worlds, Straub offers up American storytelling with the patience and atmosphere you typically find in the work of British writers. So much modern horror comes from a screaming, sometimes shrill voice, while Straub whispers, lulling the reader, and that makes what he does all the more devastating when it comes. Since he first published in the early 1970s he has been one of the best and most consistently great writers in any genre.

Here we are now, with Straub entering his fourth decade as a successful, celebrated novelist with the release of his latest, A DARK MATTER, and we’ve got him here at Horror World.

Horror World: Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us here at Horror World. It’s a real honor to have you. When I began reading your books in the mid-1980s I remember wishing I could write like you more than any of the other authors I was reading. Can you talk to us a little about your style and voice and how you developed them?

Peter Straub: I began as a poet, but my voice was all over the place.  Richard Wilbur, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand… my truest voice was kind of punchy and dogged and insistent, as I remember it. In prose, I began by loving and imitating the style of John Hawkes, plus throwing in a little Henry James whenever I thought I could. Eventually I realized that what I liked was plainer, more direct and presentational. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the upper end of this spectrum, and I loved his prose. It took me years to get Hawkes out of my system, and longer for Fitzgerald. In the mid-eighties it came to me that I wanted to write in a nearly transparent manner, with balanced sentences, musical cadences, and a consistent use of the mysteriously right word. Now I mainly try not to embarrass myself.

HW: As I mentioned above, your writing always makes me think of the usually more subtle writers of the UK. I know you lived in England for a while when your career was just taking off. What general differences do you see between the writing styles of Americans and the British?

PS: This is no longer as clear as it once was. English writers have been heavily influenced by Americans, Martin Amis by Bellow, whose influence then spread through the circle of writers who admired Amis. Philip Roth made a dent, too. n general, however, English novelists have a smoother, more fluent, more normalizing style – that is, the style of a writer like A.S. Byatt tends to convince the reader that its capacious wise observant way of taking in and considering the world is the only proper way to tackle that job. We pretty much stopped writing that way after the death of William Dean Howells.

HW: Who influenced you? Who do you read now?

PS: I’ve been influenced by Ramond Chandler, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Donald Harington, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and lots of other writers. These days, I’m reading the third and last of the Stieg Larsson novels. Writers I always read are Stephen King, Michael Connolly, George Pelecanos, C.D. Wright and John Ashbery, David Plante, Jonathan Lethem, A. S. Byatt, Bradford Morrow, Ann Lauterbach, John Crowley, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Ben Percy, and of course lots of others whose names I cannot remember now.

HW: I want to talk about some of your older work in a bit, but first let’s talk about the new one. A DARK MATTER is available for pre-order as I write this. It’s a hardcover from Random House. What can you tell us about the plot of the book?

PS: It hardly has a plot. In 1966 a phony guru with six followers conducted a misguided ceremony out in a university Agronomy meadow, and one boy died, another vanished, one lost his mind. The others dispersed. Their lives went wrong. Years later, the husband of one of the attendees tries to discover what actually happened. He hears a series of three crazy stories. That’s pretty much it. Of course, this description leaves out everything that makes the novel interesting and worth reading.

HW: A DARK MATTER, and many of your other books, deals with people looking back at some event that happened earlier in their lives. Can you talk to us a little about your use of this device?

PS: I wish I could, beyond remarking that I think this kind of “looking back” must be a very common human experience. Involved in the backward glance is the desire, conscious or not, to understand and come to terms with the meaning-laden event that compels our continuing or at least intermittent attention.

HW: Probably most people who have been to college know of some professor who used his power like Spenser Mallon in A DARK MATTER, though hopefully not with the same end results. What inspired the main events of the plot for this book?

PS: In 1963 and 1964 I sat in rooms and listened to traveling sages, guys in their early thirties, explain everything under the sun by references to politics, mysticism, personal experience, literature, bebop, marijuana, death, and sex. One of these guys was really mesmerizing: he spoke of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, of seeing a man’s hand chopped off in a bar in Tibet, of matters beyond my ken. The young women present wanted to devour him on the spot. A couple of years ago, I began to think about this man and the others like him, one of whom, a guy named Nick Ylvisacker,  lived in my apartment for some weeks before I finally threw him out. The level of fraudulence still irritated me, but the nature of their whole effort struck me as not completely dismissable: they were trying, after all, in their exploitative way, to effect some kind of general breakthrough.

HW: I asked the folks on the Horror World message boards and my followers on Facebook what they’d like to ask you. I refuse to ask if you favor Team Edward or Team Jacob, but I will pass along some of the better questions. My buddy Brad Sinor from Tulsa had almost as many questions as I do. Here’s one set of them: Are you an outliner or a seat of the pants writer? If you’re an outliner, how detailed are your outlines and how different is the final story from the outline?

PS: My method is so composed of both kinds of working that I can’t untangle them. I outline, I take off on some inspiration, I work off my notes, I outline a little more, I give up, I start again. This method generates many more pages than will constitute tye finished manuscript, because when I reach the end, I go through themwhole thing, many times, chopping and pruning.

HW: If you had to pick one novel and one shorter work of your own to put in a time capsule what would they be?

PS: Um. This is hard. I guess I’d pick The Throat and “Mrs. God.”

HW: What sort of advice would you give yourself if you could call up your younger self?

PS: “Don’t worry so much. Calm down. Everything is going to turn out a thousand times better than you can even begin to imagine. Your life will be astonishingly blessed. Just keep working, that’s the key to everything.”

HW: I’d like to ask what you think is the biggest change in publishing since you first got published, and what advice would you give to a writer looking to break in today?

PS: I’d say, do your best to write books people might actually want to read. The publishing world has turned truly cold, indifferent, frightened, and resistant. Nobody wants to read your imitation of Ben Marcus. However, do not forget that wonderful small presses have sprouted up all over the place: it’s their job to take up the slack, and what they publish is going to be some of the most significant work written in our era.

HW: Okay, I know you always get asked about GHOST STORY and Stephen King. My favorite book of yours, though, is SHADOWLAND. Tell me what inspired that book and how you feel about it now that it’s 30 years old.

PS: I can’t remember – I know only that I wanted to work with magic, and that I was finding fairy tales very compelling in those days, entirely because my firs child, Benjamin, was turning two and becoming receptive to the stories I invented for his benefit.

HW: How did your life and career change after the publication of GHOST STORY?

PS: Everything became easier and less stressful. Publishers wanted my work and were willing to  pay stunning amounts of money for it. I could pretty much buy anything I wanted, and usually I didn’t have to look at the price tag. Because of UK taxation, we were obliged to leave London and move back to America, so we bought a big beautiful house near the ocean in Westport, CT. It was a terrible mistake, one we finally corrected five years later by moving into Manhattan.

--That’s it, I have answered enough questions. No mas. It’s been fun, though.

HW: Peter, thank you again for your time. This has been a real treat for me and, I’m sure, for all the readers at Horror World. I’m looking forward to A DARK MATTER and wish you much continued success.

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