Peter Straub’s first horror novel, Julia, was published just as the genre moved into the mainstream.The essence of horror fiction is fear of the unknown. What made Peter Straub, who has died aged 79, so successful as a horror writer was his understanding that this unknown is at heart a reflection of the deeper unknowns all people face.His bestseller Ghost Story (1979), which was made into a 1981 film starring Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Melvyn Douglas, is informed by the reflection of the living that is provided by the dead. This can sometimes be funny, not in a macabre way; one thinks of Thorne Smith’s Topper stories, where the ghosts who haunt Cosmo Topper’s house try to liberate him from his own personality, and a handful of famous films from the golden age of Hollywood. Straub wrote of his own turn “toward the dark and garish” and discovering his own “first effect” when he found he “could make<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The essence of horror fiction is fear of the unknown. What made Peter Straub, who has died aged 79, so successful as a horror writer was his understanding that this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,1],"tags":[90,19,91],"class_list":["post-104267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-literature","category-news","tag-books-literature","tag-entertainment","tag-obituaries"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}