Remembering the Good Times (1985) and a satiric novel, Secrets of the Shopping Mall (1979), like Close Enough to Touch grew out of Peck's experience teaching high school in the Chicago suburbs. Each of these novels contains comic, often trenchant observations on suburban life in Glenbrook, a place thinly disguised as Glenburnie in Close Enough to Touch. A more gothic interest in the subject of death appears in the four supernatural comic novels featuring Blossom Culp: The Ghost Belonged to Me (1975); Ghosts I Have Been (1977); The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp (1983); and Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death (1986). In this series of novels, set in a turn of the century version of Peck's birthplace, Decatur, Illinois, the extrasensory gifts of young Blossom Culp bring her and her friend Alex Armsworth into contact with death in the past as well as death in the future.

Dreamland Lake (1973) also...