If You Could See Me Now works rather well. Its setting, a small farming community in the mid-West, is a great help. All Gothic novels must now streak against that particularly garish backdrop …, and specifically against those small immigrant communities which retain their indigenous customs while apparently adopting what is known as the American 'way of life'. This sense of 'passing', of remaining an alien while being ostensibly American, is central to American culture...
Like [Stephen] King, Peter Straub has a string of creepy best-sellers behind him, but he knows that he is a new arrival and knows, too, which club he wants to join—the one to which Hawthorne, Poe and Henry James belong. In fact Shadowland takes as its principle a remark of Hawthorne's which is quoted approvingly in Straub's previous novel Ghost Story: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind is concerned, by imagining a train of incid...
[Marriages] is a pastiche' of almost every notable American novel written about Europe, from J. P. Donleavy's Ireland to Henry James's Paris, but [Mr Straub] anticipates any criticism of overliterariness or derivativeness by using those qualities as a conscious and essential ingredient…. With so many echoes and resonances, it is remarkable that Mr Straub retains a distinctive voice in the story. His story of an American businessman living in Europe, and his love affairs with his ...
It is very disheartening to come across the following phrase in the second sentence of Peter Straub's Julia: "his customer was precipitous and eccentric"…. This will strike some people as an extravagant reaction, and not worth voicing. But if you fail to notice or fail to remember that "precipitous" and "precipitate" are not the same you are likely to make other kinds of mistake to do with other parts of a fiction—in setting, character, theme, a...
Peter Straub's highly ingenious tale of Kensington gore [Julia] excited me only to sceptical comment…. Julia is American, married to an English barrister, Magnus, who even at the age of three 'had an ancient, powerful soul'. Julia and Magnus had attempted an emergency tracheotomy on their nine-year-old daughter, Kate, when she choked on a piece of meat, and the child bled to death before the ambulance arrived. Julia leaves Magnus and buys a house near Holland Park; it turns out t...
Wild-eyed backwoods weirdness indeed dominates If You Could See Me Now. Peter Straub's third novel initially deceives by the familiarity of its opening formula: the bourgeois narrator is pitched against a conspiracy of silence among inhabitants of a farming community rocked by a sequence of killings. Apple-pie cosiness on every level, however, is quickly eroded. Miles Teagarden, steeped in useless campus apprehensions, is tossed with dour brutality round a circle of folk whose cult of the normal is i...
Marriages is the other side of the Jamesian tradition: an American chronicle of the quest for European richness, complexity and depth. For Owen, the Middle Western businessman who narrates it, these are all embodied in the blonde, unnamed Englishwoman with whom he betrays his wife on a hypereducated trip … to Paris and Provence. Their love-affair is skilfully told, in a cunning mosaic of shifting flashbacks, but like most such it has to struggle by over-writing against cliché, not wholly succe...
[In Open Air Peter Straub] writes a poetry of assured, slow-moving, resonant statement, which is at best potent and at worst ponderous. Technically he is extremely competent, well able to exploit (sometimes over-consciously) dramatic shifts and pauses, working for the most part in drastically cramped and abbreviated units but capable, too, of some expansive imaginative flights. Some of the poems are Crow-like metaphysical musings centred on animals and tinged with a whimsical brand of irony; but the sardoni...
