SOURCE: "Stephen King and Peter Straub: Fear and Friendship," in Discovering Stephen King, edited by Darnell Schweitzer, Starmont House, 1985, pp. 55-76.

In the essay below, Bosky examines the influence of Stephen King on the development of Straub's literary style.

Friendships between writers are always interesting, and that between Stephen King and Peter Straub is both one of the more interesting and one of the more productive in the history of supernatural and horror fiction. Even in a genre whose writers have a certain sense of community, friendship may be difficult. As Peter Straub puts it, "Meetings of writers are always like the coming together of princes who rule over small, but highly independent countries, and a wrong word, a breath of rudeness can lead to undeclared warfare." Literary friendships—such as those of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, or Clark Ashton Smith—are rare...