So much easier to just sweep it under the rug … or sink it in the water. True, it was an accident that befell Miss Galli, but they had their futures to worry about. These men harbor a secret they’ve lived with for most of their lives. Their hallucinatory nightmares foretell their own deaths, as their shared past has returned to haunt them to the grave. The group knows Ed has a nephew-a writer named Don Wanderley-whose fiction could possibly shine a light on all this strangeness that surrounds them. One of their rank, Edward Wanderley, has recently died at a local party, and there’s really not a clear reason as to how he died.
Life-long friends, they also share a dark fifty-year-old secret that’s threatening to rise from the abyss. This motley group of elderly gentlemen meet on occasion to share ghost stories with each other. Straub takes a step back and introduces us The Chowder Society. We soon discover that Wanderley is no murderer, and this young girl is definitely not what we think she is. Fearing the police is on his trail at every turn, Wanderley begins checking in to hotels on their trip south, ultimately standing near the girl when she sleeps with a knife behind his back. We are first led to believe Wanderley has abducted this girl, though she still stays with him, and doesn’t complain, even when he uses rope to tie her to him so they sleep in the car. Here we find Don Wanderley on the road with a young girl who is not his daughter.
Starting with the end of the story first, Straub takes us on a dangerous road trip.
Of course, after reading it, what I discovered inside wasn’t just a ghost story, but it was THE ghost story, probably the best I’d ever read, and even today nothing really comes close. Sure, I’d seen Ghost Story on the paperback rack in the library, but really didn’t know what it was about.
I’ll save Danse Macabre for another column, as here we will dive deep into the deep end with the first Peter Straub novel I ever read. If it wasn’t for Stephen King’s massive horror book Danse Macabre, I might not have ever read Ghost Story, or even heard of Peter Straub.
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