Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is the author of fourteen novels. He has won the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and two World Fantasy awards, and was elected Grand Master at the 1998 World Horror Convention. His books have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. He lives in New York City.

A conversation with Peter Straub the author of Mr. X

Q. Would you call yourself a horror writer? What is horror? Is it literature?

A. I'd better call myself a horror writer, or I'll be drastically out of step. My last book was a complicated suspense novel involving a famous fantasy novel, a kidnapped heroine, an extremely self-satisfied psychopath, a publishing house founded by a monstrous billionaire and run by his only slightly less corrupt son, a run-down literary colony and a long-vanished poet, and almost every reviewer cheerfully described it as horror. The three novels I wrote previous to that dealt with the lingering aftermath of both the Vietnam war and a series of murders, falsely thought to have been solved, committed decades before. Events and characters revolved through various narrative frames, changing in nature and meaning as they went. Most reviewers called these books horror novels, too. I came to the conclusion that horror was a wonderfully inclusive, expansive genre, one that took in vast amounts of territory and permitted the exploratory author to wander wherever he liked.

But what "is" horror, you ask? Is it (and here we must imagine an off-stage barrage from the tympanists), ahem, literature? The answer, my friends, depends, as is so often the case, on what the meaning of “is” is. Do we mean, how does it conduct itself, does it display good manners, does it, like a welcome guest, wear a smile and put its hosts at ease? Or are we asking, what does it mean, what does it say when it stops smiling and opens its mouth to speak? Or, to take off the gloves and get taxonomical, what makes it different from other sorts of fiction, what are its species-specific characteristics? In descending order of drawing-room acceptability, horror’s social conduct varies from exquisite decorum (as in, for example, the stories of Robertson Davies, L. P. Hartley, and Walter de la Mare) through enigmatic reserve (Robert Aickman); relaxed, utterly unenigmatic, almost folksy directness (Stephen King); vaguely or not-so-vaguely sinister charm (Ray Bradbury, say, or Thomas Tessier); enigmatic reserve felt to conceal some degree of hostility (quite a few, but these people are friends of mine, so I refuse to name names); brilliant conversationalists given to dazzling flights into the shocking, the disgusting, and the obscene (Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin Kiernan); an entranced, deeply focussed insistence on the examination of violence, mental disturbance, dissociation, and the grotesque (Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick McGrath, and Norman Partridge); overt, deliberate, but lively, therefore entertaining crudeness and hostility (Rex Miller, John Skipp & Craig Spector); and outright boorishness, those who ring your bell after midnight, charge in to beg for money, drink the last of your whisky, make a horrible mess in the bathroom, throw up all over the Persian carpet, and pass out on the sofa (no names, it would only encourage them.)

What do they say, these people, when they look you in the eye and start talking? Mainly, at least according to me, they say this: Everything is changing all the time, so open your eyes and drink in what is before you at this moment. They say: Like it or not, we live in an unpredictable, mysterious, at best half-glimpsed world, and in that world we are never truly safe. Loss, grief, and pain are all about us; at every step a physical or emotional trap door may open beneath our feet; and this tragic condition makes it possible for us to experience moments of actual transcendance, moments of breathtaking grace, for it creates meaning. Even the kind of narrative that barges in late at night, polishes off your Scotch, vomits, and spends the night on the sofa is saying, Pay attention to reality, pal, and don’t give in to denial, because what you marginalize is at the center of your experience. Whether or not this can be called literature is up to the individual reader and the individual book. In the end, horror is a point of view.

Q. Where do you get your story ideas? Did you have some serious bad dreams as a child? Do you still?

A. It's about time I told the truth about this idea business. Mine are delivered by a stretch limosine which pulls up before my house at precisely 8:00 a.m. on the first Tuesday of every month. Through the tinted windows, one dimly glimpses the twinkle of disco lights. An elderly chauffeur of almost unimaginable dignity exits, moves around the rear of the vehicle to the curbside passenger door, and opens it to decant a small, shrunken, even wraithlike figure of perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age, dressed in black leather and clutching a gleaming, black leather briefcase to its spindly chest, onto the sidewalk and assist it toward my front steps. Having been poised at the slats of the parlor’s shutters for this moment, I am already rocketing down the steps by the time the little creature arrives at the near end of the sidewalk. Smirking, he works the caches of the briefcase and withdraws a slender 8 by 11 manila envelope. Two freshly ironed, sequentially numbered $100 bills pass into his awaiting hand, the manila envelope into mine. The muses have learned a few things over the last 3,000 years. The limosine glides off to the next anxious customer, and I race upstairs to rip open the envelope and scan the contents, two or three badly-typed pages bearing from ten to fifteen brand-new, freshly minted ideas. Most of these ideas get trashed immediately. The ordinary lay person wouldn’t believe this, but 90% of inspirations, although genuine, are of no use at all. You can't even tell which of the reasonably okay ones will work for you until you sit down and begin to write. The muses don’t care who gets what, they're like thugs, all ideas are the same as far as they’re concerned.

Yes, I had many bad dreams when imprisoned in childhood. When I first started writing horror novels, the nightmares faded away. Ten years later, I drifted away from the overtly supernatural, and nightmares returned, this time more elaborate, more nuanced, and a lot scarier. Also more beautiful. I wasn't sorry to have them back. I was ready to learn what they had to say.

Q. Were you scary as a kid? Did your family or the kids on the playground have any idea what a macabre soul dwelt among them?

A. No, I wasn't scary as a child, and I'm not macabre now. Well, not all that macabre. When I was a kid, I found that I had a nice, previously unsuspected talent for telling stories, generally spooky in nature. They were also funny. On slow nights during Boy Scout camping trips, and there were many, I hurtled off the hollow log where I had been seated with half a dozen fellow Scouts, positioned myself before the fire, and uncorked improvisations about graveyards, lurking madmen, and anything else that came to mind. Shamelessly, I interrupted these tales for commercials on behalf of embalming-fluid companies, funeral parlors, taxidermists, and the like. Boffo stuff, I promise you. I could have been Morey Amsterdam, I could have been Soupy Sales! Not Stephen Wright, though, I wasn't that good.

Q. You're mining some dark territory and yet I find myself laughing out loud. How do you make a blackhearted fiend like Mr. X or Dick Dart so funny?

A. An academic education knocked the humor out of my writing for years and years. Jokes began slipping back in only after I learned to relax and let myself float a little distance outside my characters, so that I could see them three-dimensionally and appreciate both their sense of the absurd and mine. Nabokov helped, so did Dickens. Dick Dart, the psychopathic villain of The Hellfire Club, surprised me almost at the moment I gave him the microphone and turned him loose-he was surprisingly, corrosively funny, and he never wanted to shut up. What made him funny was that he often uttered unpalatable truths in a completely unacceptable way. He was an unleashed, ambulatory Id. Good old Mr. X, that deluded, homicidal, messianic sweetie-pie, creates humor through the helpless expression of unacknowledged, barely-stifled rage, like John Cleese's endearing Basil Fawlty. People who betray their suppressed anger, therefore their absurd self-importance, cannot help but be hilarious.

Q. I understand you're deeply into jazz. When did you get hooked? Does it influence your writing or is Charlie Parker your reprieve from the word processor?

A. In the enchanted summer of my thirteenth year, my fourteen-year-old cousin and secret sharer, Anne Ricker, an absolute whizbang and marvel, came with her family from Seattle to spend a couple of weeks in our house. One day Anne asked me if I had ever heard of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, jazz musicians she was sure I would like. I had not. At the end of the summer I squandered a few precious dollars on a record called "Brubeck Time," brought it home, put it on the turntable, and ascended several inches off my chair. I had never heard anything like that. I had no idea what it was, apart from its being an entirely unprecedented kind of music. (Up to then, I hardly knew anything but early Pat Boone, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and ur-doo-wop, like "Sh-Boom" and "Earth Angel.") I don't think I was completely aware that specific instruments were producing the sounds I heard. It was as though angels were conversing in angel-voices, wittily, passionately, rapturously, at a level of expression beyond the capacity of human voices. The more I listened to that extraordinary music, the more it said, and what it said was more and more expanded, shaded, and exalted by moment-by-moment feeling. It sounded like pure, unfettered expressiveness, a Platonic version of speech. That was the music for me, all right. By breaking through conventional habits and restrictions, it spoke of another, better, more responsive and informed way of life. The richer, better, more accurate life was to be found in what even then I understood was art. In a way, "Brubeck Time" rescued me, and I still listen to it now and then, always appreciatively.

I play CDs all the time when I'm working. They keep me in the room, they prove that imaginative expression is possible, and they alternately send out lightning-bolts that nail me to the chair and fade from consciousness, obliterated by concentration. For years now, the CDs are as likely be recordings of Mahler, Monteverdi, Chopin, Beethoven piano sonatas, and Wagner as of Paul Desmond, Lester Young, Bill Evans, and Phil Woods, but there are months after months when I listen to nothing but jazz.

Q.What else has an influence on your work? Bizarre news events? Old legends? Classic authors like Lovecraft or Poe?

A. I've probably been influenced by every writer I really liked, especially Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Donald Harington, Ross Macdonald, Saul Bellow, Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, John Ashbery, Iris Murdoch, Stephen King, John Updike, Shirley Hazzard, Dickens, Trollope, Wilkie Collins... the list might as well end there.

Q. What do you read for fun?

A. I'm an omnivore with a preference for fiction. Over the past six months or so, I've read the new books by Michael Cunningham, Robert B. Parker, Larry McMurtry, Philip Roth, Ian McEwen, Ann Tyler, Stephen King, Carolyn See, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Michael Connelly, Brian Moore, Matthew Stadler, Lawrence Block, Lynne Tillman, David Plante, John Updike, a bunch of Henry James novellas, and all of Dennis Lehane, plus a lot of other novels. Also biographies of Wallace Stegner, Joyce Carol Oates, Ross Macdonald, and Jack Spicer; Charles Bernstein's My Way and new collections of poetry by Louise Gluck, Jim Harrison, and C.K. Williams; about half a dozen graphic novels; a couple of books about jazz; and whatever else swam into my ken, chiefly books about biblical history and revisionist texts about the Gospels and the life of Jesus.

Q. Your fantastic bestseller Ghost Story was about a group of old men who sat around in tuxedos and told each other terrifying stories. Were you ever a part of a real-life Chowder Society? Who did you swap stories with?

A. Once upon a time, I used to listen as Whitley Streiber told me stories, but they were too compelling to interrupt with stories of my own. My favorite audiences were my children, for whom I unreeled one fantastic tale after another. I wish I'd written them down.

Q. Describe the typical Peter Straub reader to me.

A. Before I went on my first lengthy book tour, in 1982, I expected that most of the people I'd meet at the bookstore signings would be young men ranging in age from about fifteen to maybe thirty-five. Once I parked myself behind the desks in city after city, uncapped my pen and started defacing books, I discovered that I was a lousy armchair demographer. At least as many women as men were buying my books, and both genders came in every conceivable age and stage. Teenagers, college students, business people, women lawyers, young mothers, plumbers, accountants, bus drivers, grandparents and great-grandparents—the whole gorgeous spectrum of readers. In Seattle, a lovely, white-haired female rascal of at least seventy-five leaned smiling over the desk and whispered, "I like the gooshy parts." So my typical reader would be a teenager in her early sixties who, when not babysitting for her grandchildren, keeps busy by performing orthopedic surgery, trying to solve the extra credit questions in her geometry homework, doing body work on bruised Toyotas, bagging groceries at the local IGA, playing the piano in a lounge bar, coaching a Little League team, refereeing bankruptcies, and things like that. I believe that on the one occasion when she was caught stealing hubcaps, she arrested herself, represented herself in court, found herself guilty, threw herself on the mercy of herself, and let herself off with a stern warning.

My ideal reader opens each new book without too many preconceptions, has a generous range of tastes, is attentive to nuance, has a sense of humor and a capacity for wonder, tolerates and even enjoys a whiff of ambiguity, knows that almost nothing is exactly what it seems, understands other people pretty well, and gets pleasure from the operations of narrative. This person writes to me about once every two months, under different names and from various parts of the country.

Q. Do you believe in ghosts?

A. Well, no, not really. On the other hand, sure, yeah, at least maybe. At the stroke of midnight during an eclipse of the moon. Most of the ghosts I believe in are in books.

Q. You've written fourteen novels. What's next?

A. Next year, Random is going to publish a collection of shorter fiction called Magic Terror. I think it's got some of my best work. After that, I think I can promise you a real surprise, but that's all I can say about it now.