Fright Tomes: Peter Straub and the Air I Breathe
By T.J. Tranchell
Every time I saw Peter Straub, he was jotting down notes. I spent a weekend at a writer’s retreat in 2017 and he was the special guest. Of course, I listened to his advice on storytelling and all manner of craft. But the notetaking fascinated me most. He had the classic black Moleskine notebook and was using the Blackwing pencils known to be favored by John Steinbeck.
At that moment, I realized something important. Straub, a best-selling novelist and one of the top names in horror from the 1970s boom all the way through to his death in 2022, had his writerly affectations. The Moleskine notebook has often been associated with Ernest Hemingway, and the Blackwing pencils, as mentioned, were a favorite of Steinbeck. Many people do this. When you are kid playing baseball, you want the mitt or the bat with your favorite player’s signature stamped or carved into it. How many people — usually dudes — do you know who order a “martini shaken, not stirred” because of James Bond? Writers are particularly prone to this because we think there is a magic formula for success, or just to be closer to those whom we admire. Straub didn’t believe in a magical, easy way, to authorial success. It’s words on the page and taking notes about the world around you and any thought that comes to mind.
Straub — and I think this is an absolute tragedy — gets lumped with his good friend Stephen King all too often. Yes, they co-wrote two novels together, The Talisman and The Black House, and maybe the second of those books veered more into King’s shared universe, but much of it was set in Straub’s territory of Wisconsin. The books are not as successful without Straub.
Way before I met this literary giant or touched one of his novels, I’d been exposed to his work. I remember seeing parts of the film adaptation of his novel Ghost Story when I was young. The ghostly reveals and a guy falling through a window to his death stuck with me even when I didn’t know what they were from. And when I put the pieces together that this was first a novel and that it was Straub’s, I dug deeper.
Straub’s writing does have that “everyman” aspect like much of the horror grown from the ’70s, but it is an everyman who was able to get out of his small town. It’s an everyman who was sent to Vietnam and has to deal with that for the rest of his life. Straub himself didn’t serve but he captures those characters brilliantly in his Blue Rose Trilogy (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat), and the nuances of how that conflict continued to resonate throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s. The fascinating thing about the three books is that [SPOILER ALERT] one doesn’t figure out the connections until the third book.
But Straub wasn’t done. One of the primary characters from the Blue Rose Trilogy is writer Tim Underhill. Underhill gets to come back to his hometown of Millhaven for my two favorite Straub novels Lost Boy, Lost Girl and In the Night Room. Published in 2003 and 2004 respectively, the two novels both won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. Other writers have won that award multiple times, while Straub has won five. And other writers have won it in back-to-back years, but Straub is the only one to go back-to-back in wins with a duology.
Affectations, awards, similarities… all that stuff is great, but none of it matters if the writing is poor. In The Throat, Straub wrote, “The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.” In his novel Floating Dragon, Straub tackled aging, “Being seventy-six has a few advantages, one of them being that a premature demise is no longer possible,” Straub wrote.
And like many of the great horror writers, Straub had a way with essays about the craft of writing and why horror was not just something to be shuffled aside as we grow older. “Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things — I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe,” he once wrote.
I don’t know what he jotted down in that notebook with those amazing pencils. I do know that even as he took notes, he would look you in the eye when he spoke to you and when you spoke to him. I know that even now, four years after his passing, I can turn my head from where I’m writing this and look at his books on my shelf. I can pull one out, my hardcover copy of House Without Doors, and read the inscription that begins “For T.J.” And I can choose to share the rest of the words in his books with you while choosing to keep the inscription to myself. Some words are for everyone, and some are just for me. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on X @TJ_Tranchell.
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