Ghost Story: Tasha Robinson's comments
Don’t feel so alone here in the middle ground, Ellen. If the bell curve is any indication, it should probably be pretty crowded here. Frankly, I’ve been a little surprised at the vitriolic backlash against Ghost Story, which I thought would be a pretty popular book-club choice, accessible and easy to discuss. I’d never read Peter Straub before (apart from the two Talisman books he co-authored with Stephen King), but I had somehow mentally conflated him with King and with John Saul, and I thought Ghost Story would be a relatively quick, pulpy, beachy kinda read.
So what I got instead sometimes stymied me and sometimes pleasantly surprised me. I take Ghost Story as more supernatural literary anthology than a novel—its best parts for me were often isolated stories that almost could have been removed from their settings and read separately, like Don’s opening-book cross-country journey, where it’s increasingly unclear who exactly is kidnapping whom. Or the first Fenny Bate story, which for me was the novel’s most chilling, riveting sequence. (Full disclosure: I’ve never read The Turn Of The Screw, so I wasn’t making mental comparisons.) Or Don’s college romance, which is allowed to play out at leisurely length. I loved all of these stories, and they pulled me in the way a good ghost story should.
But as with most anthologies, some parts are better than others, and where Ghost Story let me down was generally in the connective tissue, which is slacker than the stories it surrounds—particularly toward the end, when a direct, violent confrontation with Fenny and Gregory builds up a head of steam which Straub then permits to dissipate into a weak raspberry noise, as weeks pass with no further action or planning—just a lot of words about the desperation of the town, which strangely doesn’t seem to touch the protagonists. It was odd to be told that no groceries were coming in and no one could go out and supplies were running low and people were acting crazy, and then see Ricky and his friends spontaneously and without comment sit down to a massive steak dinner with all the trimmings. Logical lapses like that, or just places where I wanted something to happen, and instead got a long, wandering description of Milburn, took me out of the story far more often and more thoroughly than the sentence structure that bugged Leonard so much.
Frankly, the writing in Ghost Story rarely if ever bothered me. Leonard and I have established before that we just don’t get the same thing out of books, even when we both enjoy them, and here’s a perfect case in point: He couldn’t care about the story because the writing bothered him. I couldn’t care about the writing so long as I was enjoying the story. I’m not indifferent to bad writing—I had to put Dan Brown’s Angels And Demons down just a couple of chapters in because it was so poorly written that I couldn’t care less about all the big hooks it was trying to throw at me—but in this case… Well, if I’m running down a path on my way to a place I think I’m going to enjoy, I generally won’t notice if some of the individual paving stones are discolored or cracked, as long as I don’t actually trip on one. The celebratory steak dinner in a starving town tripped me up. So did the long bouts of downtime between actual confrontations with the evil plaguing Milburn. So did the “Gregory suddenly explains what he is” moment, which other people have rightly complained about as a demystifying disappointment that deflates the book before it’s ready.