Rating: 
Summary: (...)
Review: (...) Each story makes one hope there's a payoff somewhere. There isn't. Only more words. Only more boredom. Only more tedious nonsense....
Rating: 
Summary: Ummm . . .
Review: A kintegarten teacher uses scatalogy as a fulcrum for a kidnapping spree . . .Classic, mordant Straub. Read this book if you want to remember horror's propensity as an awe-inspiring genre. Will-o-the-wisps such as John Saul can only marvel at Straub's magic ball.
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Summary: Self-revealing horror
Review: As usual, Peter Straub writes in a fashion that can be interpreted on many levels. Those who scoff perhaps have little skill in self-evaluation, perhaps deniel of there own dark side. If one reads Straub from an introspective point of view, the result can only be amazing. The psychological depth of the characters is almost bottomless. Straub is not just for the intellectually inclined, it is also for those who are willing to boldly face the truth about the dark side of human nature. Fiction may reveal more truth than non-fiction. I recommend reading these stories with your mind open, even if somewhat obstinately, to the dark side. To your dark side. It is there in all of us. Some show it more than others; but a bold look at it can only result in growth and understanding. Plunge into these Straub offerings head first. Hold your breath. You will resurface in time to breathe again.
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Summary: The most disturbing thing I have ever read in my life!
Review: First, let me explain that I don't scare easy. The only movie I ever saw which came even close to scaring me was the Exorist - and I was 5 years old, and had a fever at the time. And just 2 weeks ago terrorists blew up 2 sky scrapers 4 blocks from where I work, and I'm the only one in my office who doesn't seem in the least bit worried about anything else happening. But these damn stories... sheesh! I'm an aspiring writer myself, and even if I could write stuff like this - I don't think I'd want the ability. The just *hang on* to you, the images of what takes place. They haunt every idle moment of your day and trespass in your dreams. I love horror stories, and these are the finest I've read yet, but I'm not entirely sure I don't regret having read them. As for this book, I read it based on a recommendation written by Stephen King. And as each story plods along (it's not exactly a fast-paced page turner) I occasionaly paused to think, "Jeez, that's ****ed up!" - but it's not until he wraps up the tale that your mind just says, "No! That didn't happen, I didn't just read about that!". Each story is more disturbing than the last. When I finally started on the final tale, "Mr. Club and Mr. Cuff", I thought, "Oh, this seems whimsical enough. Maybe the 'scare you down to your soul' type stuff is over. But it's been a year and a half - and passages from that story still haunt me. If you think for a moment that after a lifetime of being desensitized to violence and cruelty in American culture, you can imagine every messed up thing one person can do to another, you will find yourself "corrected" (in the sense used in The Shining) each time to finish one of these sick, twisted stories. And if you see that as a challenge, and buy this book anyway - please seriously consider skipping the last one if the previous ones had an unpleasant impact on the way you see the world. But don't say I didn't warn ya.
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Summary: Listening to Terror...
Review: I am lucky enough to have a public library which has a great collection of unabridged books on tape, and listened to this book as I went about my business. All of the stories are first rate...inspiring many emotions at once with each disturbingly brilliant episode. One comes to appreciate the short form with these tales. Most, if not all are told in the first person. All of them are enormously humanistic, in that he seems to believe that our lives are shaped by the wrongs done to us....and that evil actions have a reason beyond being just born that way. These little journeys into the lives the walking wounded and damaged tell much about ourselves, and the real terror for many of us is the possibility that between victims and predators, there is a common humanity. And that humanity is not always drawn in shades of black and white.
Rating:
Summary: re-warmed junk
Review: I have read Peter Straub for over 20 years. I loved his early work, including Ghost Story & If you could see me now, among others. My very favorite is the brilliant Koko. But, with the exception of Hellfire Club (a non-stop action ride), his recent work has been just terrible. This book epitomizes the worst of the worst. As noted by several of the reviewers, regular Straub readers have already seen a number of these tales. The Ghost Village in particular just takes two whole sections from Koko & The Throat and raps them around a few new paragraphs at the begining and end about a black soldier in 'nam faced with a tragedy at home. Fee is also recycled material. The "new" stuff is just bad (and again, all of this has been published elsewhere, just with varying degrees of broad scale distribution). Ashputtle is a great example. Ironic, important sounding sentences appear out of nowhere, apparently glimpses into the soul and history of this poor deranged soul. But there is no story here. Isn't it romantic IS more straight forward, but only illustrates the point that Straub has lost the ability to tell an engaging story (even shifting genre to an espionage tale). The ending is predictable. Straub has increasingly become impressed with the sound of his own literary voice. He writes these florid sentences to impress the critics, or himself, or whomever which earn him a reputation as a "serious" writer. "Wow, he must be good if he can write these pretty words." This, in my opinion, is the worst kind of writing. He has lost attention to just telling a good, fresh, riveting tale. The last time he did so was with Hellfire Club, which featured the devilish, truly maniacal Dick Dart as a great villain, & a sturdy, empathetic heroine in Nora. One other comment: I hope The Ghost Village is the last we will see of Underhill, Poole, Ransom et al. Again, I LOVED them in Koko. But Straub has long ago played that theme out. The guy did not serve in Vietnam, & it shows. If you want to read good Vietnam based fiction, try Tim O'Brien. In the Lake of the Woods (not ostensibly a horror novel) is way more terrifying than anything here. I hope his reunion with Steven King will bring him back to the basics. Straub used to be able to write well AND tell a good story. In recent works, he leaves us with the shell of self-important prose, leading nowhere. King is sort of the polar opposite: he doesn't pretend to great literary value for its own sake in his prose, but, man, does he tell a story - and in so doing, succeeds (on his own terms) more often than not.
Rating:
Summary: Strange Tales, Great Writing
Review: I've been a huge fan of Peter Straub's since I read "Ghost Story" thirteen years ago. To this day, it's still just about my favorite book. With the addition of the Blue Rose trilogy ("Koko," "Mystery," and "The Throat"), which is also fantastic, Straub has quite a few titles in my short list of all-time favorite books. It's his writing that gets me every time. It's always deeply moving, evocative, and poetic. Reading Peter Straub is like experiencing a richly-woven dream from which you just don't want to wake up. I enjoyed Straub's last collection of short fiction, "Houses Without Doors," but felt it was less satisifying than the novels he had been putting out at the time ("Koko", "Mystery"). The stories in that collection had an experimental quality that worked at times, but sometimes left me feeling they were too bizarre for their own good. There is a similar pervisity in the stories in this new collection, but I think Straub comes closer in "Magic Terror" to doing what he does so well in his novels. "The Ghost Village," one of the stronger stories in the collection, starts with a great Straub opening line and just builds and builds from there. Fans of "Koko" will enjoy revisiting the haunted Vietnam soldiers of that story. "Porkpie Hat" and "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," two more strong entries, are closer in length to novellas than short stories. "Porkpie Hat," which happily combines Straub's enthusiasms for jazz and the past, is a shere pleasure to read. "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," a riff on Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," borders on the overly-bizarre, but is more than enjoyable enough to make it worth reading. The prose in this novella is almost downright Dickensian. "Bunny is Good Bread" is a harrowing psychological etching of the childhood of a disturbed individual who will show up later in Straub's "Blue Rose" trilogy. The Cinderella-esque fable "Ashputtle" is similarly disturbing. "Hunger, An Introduction" is funny, strange, and stirring all at the same time. My least favorite story was "Isn't It Romantic?," which I felt was longer than it needed to be, and as result was too slow and predictable. But even when Straub isn't in top form, his language is always a pleasure to read. Another down-side to this kind of collection is that if you're a big fan, you've probably already sought out at least a couple of these stories in their original places of publication. Of the seven stories collected here, I had already read three. But it was fun to re-read them, anyway. All in all, these seven tales deliver the reader on a satisfying journey of the psyche, at turns dark and tortuous (also torturous) and alternately achingly poetic. Straub often lingers in the finer spaces where beauty and wonder mix like dreamy liquids with the ether of the human soul. In "Porkpie Hat," he writes that "[a]nyone who hears a great musician for the first time knows the feeling that the universe has just expanded." That same universe-expanding quality can be found in Straub's prose. If you've never read Peter Straub before, you should probably start with "Ghost Story" or the "Blue Rose" trilogy. The stories in "Magic Terror" tend more towards the category of "acquired tastes". If you enjoy Straub's writing and have something of an adventurous mind, I'd definitely recommend this book. I felt that this was something of a return to form for Straub. While not as good or as consistant as his best writing, I was more satisfied with "Magic Terror" than I was with his last two slightly disappointing novels, "The Hellfire Club" and "Mr. X." I now eagerly look forward to Straub's new collaboration with Stephen King.
Rating:
Summary: Strange Tales, Great Writing
Review: I've been a huge fan of Peter Straub's since I read "Ghost Story" thirteen years ago. To this day, it's still just about my favorite book. With the addition of the Blue Rose trilogy ("Koko," "Mystery," and "The Throat"), which is also fantastic, Straub has quite a few titles in my short list of all-time favorite books. It's his writing that gets me every time. It's always deeply moving, evocative, and poetic. Reading Peter Straub is like experiencing a richly-woven dream from which you just don't want to wake up. I enjoyed Straub's last collection of short fiction, "Houses Without Doors," but felt it was less satisifying than the novels he had been putting out at the time ("Koko", "Mystery"). The stories in that collection had an experimental quality that worked at times, but sometimes left me feeling they were too bizarre for their own good. There is a similar pervisity in the stories in this new collection, but I think Straub comes closer in "Magic Terror" to doing what he does so well in his novels. "The Ghost Village," one of the stronger stories in the collection, starts with a great Straub opening line and just builds and builds from there. Fans of "Koko" will enjoy revisiting the haunted Vietnam soldiers of that story. "Porkpie Hat" and "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," two more strong entries, are closer in length to novellas than short stories. "Porkpie Hat," which happily combines Straub's enthusiasms for jazz and the past, is a shere pleasure to read. "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," a riff on Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," borders on the overly-bizarre, but is more than enjoyable enough to make it worth reading. The prose in this novella is almost downright Dickensian. "Bunny is Good Bread" is a harrowing psychological etching of the childhood of a disturbed individual who will show up later in Straub's "Blue Rose" trilogy. The Cinderella-esque fable "Ashputtle" is similarly disturbing. "Hunger, An Introduction" is funny, strange, and stirring all at the same time. My least favorite story was "Isn't It Romantic?," which I felt was longer than it needed to be, and as result was too slow and predictable. But even when Straub isn't in top form, his language is always a pleasure to read. Another down-side to this kind of collection is that if you're a big fan, you've probably already sought out at least a couple of these stories in their original places of publication. Of the seven stories collected here, I had already read three. But it was fun to re-read them, anyway. All in all, these seven tales deliver the reader on a satisfying journey of the psyche, at turns dark and tortuous (also torturous) and alternately achingly poetic. Straub often lingers in the finer spaces where beauty and wonder mix like dreamy liquids with the ether of the human soul. In "Porkpie Hat," he writes that "[a]nyone who hears a great musician for the first time knows the feeling that the universe has just expanded." That same universe-expanding quality can be found in Straub's prose. If you've never read Peter Straub before, you should probably start with "Ghost Story" or the "Blue Rose" trilogy. The stories in "Magic Terror" tend more towards the category of "acquired tastes". If you enjoy Straub's writing and have something of an adventurous mind, I'd definitely recommend this book. I felt that this was something of a return to form for Straub. While not as good or as consistant as his best writing, I was more satisfied with "Magic Terror" than I was with his last two slightly disappointing novels, "The Hellfire Club" and "Mr. X." I now eagerly look forward to Straub's new collaboration with Stephen King.
Rating:
Summary: Horror worse than terror and yet terrific
Review: In this collection of tales, Peter Straub is exploring some disturbing and disquieting territories. Some of them are extremely fascinating and for compulsive readers. The themes are also very varied. One constant : there is always an element of supernatural that is either leading the story or just plain misleading the reader. At times this element only comes right at the end. So we swing between realistic descriptions and tales, and completely supernatural unbalance. We can find many influences in these tales, particularly Vietnam, racism and religious bigotry : some kind of religious social darwinism. The supernatural elements just make the story absurd from a realistic point of view but perfectly understandable, logical from the extreme point of view that is exposed and rejected. There is always double talk in those tales, some kind of two forked tongues in both cheeks. The best, from my point of view, is « Porkpie Hat », because we have to imagine the real explanation, which is not too hard to do, and yet there might be another explanation just as logical as the first one, since the first one goes against so many things embedded in Southern society. This first explanation is just « impossible », because it breaks all limits, here racial limits, in this society. And yet... To be read instantly. Peter Straub is the best manipulator of supernatural magic in horror literature. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.
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Summary: STRAUB AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM!
Review: It is always with a sense of anxiety that one picks up a Peter Straub work...that feeling akin to coming unexpectedly upon the scene of a violent accedent while driving to a favorite vacation spot. Lulled into a false feeling of luxurious complacency, the horrific spectacle of glittering glass and bloodied pavement is at once terrible and fascinating. No matter how many stories one reads in a lifetime, Straub can have that same, irreversible effect on a reader. "Magic Terror", his latest collection of short fiction, is no different. From first word to last, it is impossible to tear your eyes from the page. His elegant prose wraps itself insidiously around your every thought and lingers there like the remnants of a terrifying childhood nightmare. The seven tales here are classic Straub...haunting and beautiful. The most astonishing piece is the story entitled "Bunny Is Good Bread". Appropriately dedicate to horror-meister Stephen King (with whom Straub collaborated with on "The Talisman"), "Bunny" is the hypnotic tale of the childhood of a boy who will grow up to be a serial killer. Evoking William S. Burroughs in its disconnected imagery and narrative style, "Bunny" is one of the most grotesque and horror-inducing works of fiction Straub has ever written. The story is worth reading twice, just to be sure that no small detail is overlooked. While the remaining six stories are Straub at the top of his form, it's "Bunny" that stays firmly implanted in ones mind. Worth every penny of the cover price, "Magic Terror" will increase the value of every literary collection that it graces!
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