Peter Straub’s Magic Terror
7 Stories -- by a World Fantasy & Bram Stoker Award Winning Legend
Oct 6, 2007
Peter Straub is best known for his 1979 classic novel Ghost Story. His collection, Magic Terror (from 2000) gathers seven stories including World Fantasy and Bram Stoker-Award winners. Many of them share with Ghost Story, Straub’s delight in stories within stories.
“Ashputtle” opens the collection, a sly, disturbing tale of an obese kindergarten teacher unsuspected of involvement in the disappearance of a child, whose horror comes courtesy of faint disgust at the narrator’s fecal handiwork.
“Isn’t It Romantic?” continues with the same skewed view of the world contaminating what seems a quite ordinary narrative. Having established a slightly eerie tone with the first few pages, Straub then leads the reader into an apparently standard thriller. Despite attempts to imbue the role of assassin with some deeper meaning, and an interesting lead character, ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ fizzles out, reading as if two stories have been grafted together in an uneasy mix of genres.
"The Ghost Village" returns the reader to the familiar territory of The Vietnam War, settings more reminiscent of Lucius Shepherd and Joe Haldeman. However as it progresses, Straub’s prose takes it into completely unexpected directions: "the men lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as physical as a blanket.’ ‘The Ghost Village’ gets stronger and stronger, and provides the pivot for the whole book.
Straub then moves from Shepherd to Stephen King territory, to whom he dedicates “Bunny Is Good Bread.” It would be easy if the reader didn’t know the author to assume this was actually a King story. Set in a 1950’s small town boarding house occupied by a small boy, his war-veteran father and dying mother, the story belongs in an America far closer to the film-noir of “From Dangerous Depths,” showing at the local cinema, than the fake nostalgia of “Happy Days.” The film and even grimmer reality become inextricably linked in the boy’s consciousness, and Straub shows the birth of a monster, yet it would be hard not to feel sympathy for the small boy; forged in the crucible of terror and abuse into a nascent killer.
“Porkpie Hat” about the eponymous jazz saxophonist takes the reader further back again for Hat’s Halloween tale, highlighting Straub’s other great strength, his attention to detail which enables him to paint vivid mental pictures. The narrator of “Porkpie Hat” is a callow freshman, who arranges to interview Hat for an article. Buried in Hat’s drunken ramblings is a tale of a 1920’s Mississippi childhood and a Halloween visit to the poor part of town with his friend, “looking for scares”. They find more than expect in the best section in the book, mixing superlative description with genuine thrills.
“Hunger, An Introduction” is on first reading the most conventional story in the book, narrated by the self-justifying ghost of a murderer. However, by now it is clear that Straub is working to subvert the genre’s conventions, with the ghost picking apart one by one our usual beliefs, in a labyrinthine, oblique study of how we live our lives.
Magic Terror ends with “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff”. The story of a financial advisor who calls in a pair of “consultants” to assist in gaining retribution on his cheating wife: ‘“We are not like artists,” said Mr. Clubb, “we are artists.”’
The names give the game away. This is comedy at its blackest, starring a cast of deliberately stereotyped caricatures, and full of ambiguity. Straub’s characters talk in an argot so rich they even parody his own creator. The ending is both satisfying and logical but never predictable, a fine conclusion to a book that starts hesitantly but toward the end gathers momentum like an avalanche.
