Literary Birthday – 2 March – Peter Straub

Peter Straub was born on 2 March 1966 and died on 4 September 2022.

Peter Straub Quotes

1. My stories are creepy? Honest to God, to me all those stories seem to be accurate representations of real life. All right, maybe some of them are a little alarming. But being alarmed isn’t all that bad. It tends to keep your pulse rate up. (P.S. FAQs)
2. If you want to know the truth, and you don’t, an enormous number of really ordinary, banal things frighten me. (P.S. FAQs)
3. Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down. (P.S. FAQs)
4. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people. (The Throat)
5. Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. The ordinary world of work is closed to him – and that if he’s lucky! (A-Z)
6. You cannot overestimate the role of intuition in fiction writing. Or the role of accident or randomness. These things are very central. This is never really admitted. You have to cover the pages. You have to have those people do things. And the things they do have to be relevant to the entire concern. The specific things they do don’t much matter, you just have to have them do something that counts. (A-Z)
7. I wish I’d known at the beginning that all I really had to do is trust myself. Everything would work out as if by magic once I actually leaned back into my imagination and just let it work, and not question it and not fret about it. (A-Z)
8. A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror. (A-Z)
9. If I planned everything out in advance, I’d expire of boredom. (A-Z)
10. I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It’s out of a desire to really show what’s going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don’t want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won’t mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn. (Facebook Post)

Peter Straub was an American novelist and poet. The New York Times bestselling author wrote horror and supernatural fiction novels, including Julia, Floating Dragon, Ghost Story, Shadowland, and The Talisman (which was co-written with Stephen King). He used slipstream fiction techniques in his writing, particularly in Conjunctions 39. He also wrote in the mystery genre with the Blue Rose trilogy, consisting of Koko, Mystery, and The Throat. He mixed supernatural and crime fiction in Lost Boy, Lost Girl, and In the Night Room. He also published short fiction, poetry, and a graphic novel, The Green Woman. Straub’s final novel, A Dark Matter, was released in 2010. According to The Guardian: ‘One of his early influences was Henry James, whose The Turn of the Screw is one of the greatest ghost stories, but he would also cite many other classic novelists, as well as poets such as John Ashbery and William Carlos Williams.’ Straub received many literary honours including the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and International Horror Guild Award. His daughter Emma Straub has become a novelist.

Source for image: KyleCassidy (identity confirmed), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Straub.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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