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Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by.” In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.”
What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me.....the most dreadful thing." That's how Peter Straub's GHOST STORY begins..... This is actually one of the "scariest" books I've read so far as atmosphere and actual emotional scare goes. The next part of the book tells the story of Donald Wanderley, the child kidnapper from the prologue. He is a nephew of the dead club member of the Chowder Society and an author of a horror novel.They remember the crime they had committed years before...and wonder if the time of retribution has finally arrived.
While in Florida, Eva emerges from the form of the little girl and attempts to twist Donald's mind. He is able to resist, and kills her after she tries to take the form of a wasp to escape. Donald then prepares to go to San Francisco to hunt down Florence de Peyser. Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Gordon Anthony Straub and Elvena (Nilsestuen) Straub. Not since Edgar Allan Poe has an author taken such liberties with his readers’ nerves…A masterwork of horror.”— Cosmopolitan And yet in this case there’s a very good reason for this unsettling behavior. You just have to let the story unfold—and the story begins with The Chowder Society. The simple fact is that for most of us, all the terrorists and all the murderers and all the faultily-constructed planes in all the world are not nearly as likely to hurt us than uncontrolled cell growth within our own bodies. Sure, I get a little jittery when my plane hits turbulence; and yes, I sneak around my own house with a baseball bat every time I hear a bump in the night. But truthfully, the only thing that really scares me is cancer.
I have read this book several times now, and I firmly believe it is the The Brothers Karamazov of the horror book world. Yes, he admitted to himself for the thousandth time, he did like it here. It went against his principles and his politics and probably the puritanism of his long-vanished religion too, but Sears’s library – Sears’s whole splendid house – was a place where a man felt at ease.”
Ghost Story, directed by John Irvin". Time Out. London. Archived from the original on June 6, 2016 . Retrieved December 14, 2017. He looked into their cell between the bars. Their bodies were on the hard floor beneath the cot against the far wall, two still white forms. Nothing wrong there. Wait a second, he thought, trying to remember the day he had put them in the cell. Didn't he put Mrs. Barnes on top of the bunk? He was almost certain . . . he peered in at them. Now wait, just hold it up a minute here, he thought, and even in the cold of the unheated cells, began to sweat. A white-covered little parcel that could only be the Griffen baby---frozen to death in his own bed---lay on the cot. "Now just wait a goddamned second," he said, "that can't be." He'd put the Griffen baby with de Souza, in a cell on the other side of the corridor. It has evil and horror elements in the book but if you are looking for a haunted house or poltergeist, you’ll not find it in Ghost Story. I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...” Want to learn the ideas in Ghost Story better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Ghost Story by Peter Straub here.
The first half is some of the best horror I´ve read, not much splatter or violence, just the extremely detailed description with some really scary scenes that fuel the readers´ paranoia in the darkness. There are some moments one might not forget so soon, if not even never, but suddenly there is a bit more action and story, which make the terror factor disappear. That kind of fear, though, based solidly in statistical reality, is almost too much to bear. It’s impossible to live your life constantly thinking about that possibility, that probability, lingering up ahead in the future. Stephen King, in his non-fiction review of the horror medium, Danse Macabre, lists Ghost Story as one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century and provides a lengthy review within its "Horror Fiction" section. [1] Relation to other Straub works [ edit ] What's not to like? Several things. first of all, the pace: the book is monstrous slog. A chore to get through. Straub switches between several narrative viewpoints (much like Stoker in Dracula) and the plot plods frequently and slows down so much that reading soon becomes a challenge. There's no doubt that Straub is a great writer - some of his passages I've read several times, because I simply enjoyed them so much - but he becomes lost in what he tries to do, the references he includes so subtly vanish in the detail he describes so voraciously.
Un sentito omaggio ai classici racconti gotici dell'orrore ed una originale rivisitazione delle storie di fantasmi, vampiri e lupi mannari: non a caso due dei protagonisti fanno di cognome Hawtorne e James ed il racconto di Sears James all'inizio è in pratica un rifacimento de Il giro di vite (The Turn of the Screw) di Henry James.
I enjoyed the complexities of the friendships with the four men and you eventually find out why their companionship is so important to each other. MY THOUGHTS: I started to read Peter Straub after he co-wrote The Talisman with Stephen King. He is an author I run hot and cold on. Ghost Story is hot. It is a book that I reread every few years, and I always seem to find bits where I think, 'Damn! I don't remember that. . .'
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