Horror Yearbook: To start of the interview, would you just introduce yourself for any of our readers who may not be familiar with your work?

My name is Peter Straub, I live in New York City and have for maybe twenty-five years. I am a native of the Midwest, however. My wife and I lived in England and Ireland for ten years during the 70s. I forget how many books exactly I’ve written, but I think it’s eighteen or nineteen novels, two collections of short stories, and one nonfiction book of critical essay and memoirs. My work has been popular enough to allow me to live off the proceeds, so I make a living by writing, which nobody seems to be able to do nowadays. The world has gotten tougher. I’ve been able to sustain myself through my work for a very long time, and that’s a privilege and an honor. It’s something that I’m very happy to be able to say. To tell you the truth, it’s exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I needed when I began.

HYB: Let’s get right into A Dark Matter, which you just completed and hit shelves about two weeks ago. I just finished reading it, and it’s seriously good. You use this reflexive technique, in which the main character is an author, investigating this terrifying occurrence from his high school years which he wasn’t directly involved with for a novel which the character is writing. Structurally, it’s like Citizen Kane. And it’s extremely creepy and effective.. so where did this story come from?

Peter Straub: My writing process isn’t always the same. Almost always, I have this sort of outline that I like to think of as a safety net. If I’m on a day where I feel sort of uninspired, I’ll have a road map of what exactly it is that I’m supposed to be doing. Sometimes I’ll depart from this map very early along in the course of a book. I’ve written outlines where I’m more or less in the middle of a book, so I’ll have some clear version as to how to get through to the end.

This time, it was particularly strange. I was going to write a novella. A book which was then called “Skylark”. It was going to be ninety pages long and have nine chapters, so each chapter would be about ten pages. The first chapter turned out to be about one hundred and fifty pages, so my novella was cooked. And I still had outlines for the other sections, but I understood that each of those sections was going to be longer than I anticipated, and the whole project was going to be much, much longer.

I passed through various illnesses while I was writing this book, so there were times I wasn’t as clear headed as I should have been and I wasn’t too sure what sections were going to be about. When I’m in a position like that, I just keep writing, hoping something will emerge out of the fog. Eventually my problems got straightened out, I was able to work better, I had more energy, and I discovered that I had been in a process of building a house around me without quite being sure if it was supposed to have three stories, or four stories; whether or not the kitchen was in the basement or in the middle of the house. It was all kind of vague. I had no choice but to proceed with the brick and the lumber that I had set in place. That’s why the book is as strange as it is. I didn’t know when I began that it was going to have that Citizen Kane-like search, with a central narrator tries to listen to other people who try to explain what they think happened and it never occurred to me that I was reinventing Rashomon, but I was reinventing Rashoman. However, once I had the book set up, I had this incident of the occurrence in the meadow, and then kind of parallel to it, a rather buried, but very hideous crime in the past: the whole matter of Keith Hayward. I had two elements that could be kept very nicely in balance, both of which seemed extremely interesting to me, and I would then have the pleasure of seeing how all these people remembered exactly what happened to them.

And I wanted to get in the dead babies, the fact that one of the characters saw a tower of dead babies. Once someone has remembered the character saying that, that’s all we need of it. I wanted his contribution to be a very strange, dislocating story that questions meaning altogether. What’s so frightening to Jason “Boats” Boatman, and should be very unsettling to us, is that in the end it seems to suggest that nothing means anything at all. Everything is reduced to a word printed on a piece of paper. Things themselves have no real meaning. In fact, things themselves barely have an existence. That’s as nihilistic as I know how to get.

That then stands in balance to what happens when The Eel finds herself climbing a stairway to heaven. Which, if you were to find yourself in such a position, is absolutely terrifying, because the deity at the top of the stairs incorporates every single aspect of every single reality we know, and therefore it incorporates violence, ugliness, and destruction, as well as beauty and music. A friend of mine said: “You have it exactly right. You can always get to the stairway to heaven after you walk through a field of dead babies.” And that, let me tell you, is more or less the truth.

HYB: And you’ve written a couple novels with Stephen King?

Peter Straub: Stephen was a friend of mine from very early on. He was just beginning to be sort of well known, but he wasn’t actually famous. The people who respected him most and knew him the best were publishers. Very early on in his career, they understood that this guy was going to do very, very well, that his instincts were fabulous, and the signs were he was going to make a ton of money. The general public didn’t have that insight yet, so the Stephen King I met was basically just another writer like me, but he was doing a little better than most. He was a very engaging guy, a lot of fun to be with, and very smart, very funny, very driven. He was really wound up with energy. We liked each other, and we spent a good deal of time together. We were both living in England at the time, he had a place way out of town. So he stayed at my place when he came to London.

One night, very late, he asked me if I knew what would be a lot of fun, and I said no, I don’t, why don’t you tell me, and he said I think we should collaborate on a book. It sounded great to me, so we decided to do it. And I think we really got somewhere with The Talisman. It was at times, very hard work. There was so much of it. When it was done, we knew that this book was filled with tenderness, it was filled with affection, which makes it kind of rare I think. I think it comes from the fact that so many people really loved that book. It took us about a year and a half, which is rather longer than Stephen’s books have generally taken. I was writing as I still do a lot slower than he does.

The next time around, which took place a long time after, we already knew that we could absolutely trust each other. We were writing something a little closer to what we normally do, it was more of a horror story than a fantasy. And the work moved very quickly, it was very enjoyable. We worked up the ground rules, the big chronology, and moments of climax in the book out in Florida where he was residing. We were settled in about ten days, and we retired to our corners. I wrote the beginning, sent it to him, he was delighted. He sent me back fifty pages, then I sent him fifty pages. We kept it up until we were sending back sets of about one hundred pages each. That book took less than a year I think to write. It was smooth sailing the whole time, Stephen wrote the ending, and the ending is gorgeous. It came out of the blue. We hadn’t planned any of that stuff, about Jack Sawyer getting shot and what happens after he’s shot. King just made it up, an invention of inspiration of the moment. It was a great experience. We’re going to do it one more time in perhaps two years.

HYB: Moving off the topic of writing; there’s been at least one film adaptation of your work, correct?

Peter Straub: There were two actually. The first one was a version of a novel called Julia. The movie wound up being called The Haunting of Julia, it starred Mia Farrow, and it was pretty good. It was made in London. The producers had very little money and that kind of showed. The screenplay is not the most articulate, or better say, not the most coherent script ever written. It’s certainly no Citizen Kane. It never gets around to departing certain bits of information that are kind of essential to the story. Those absences make the movie a little surreal, so it’s kind of enjoyable in that one peculiar way. The film does have some power, it has a beautiful ending. And Mia Farrow gives one of her better performances in the sort of injured wife role that Mia Farrow could do extremely well. Fairly similar to the injured wife in Rosemary’s Baby.

The next film was Ghost Story which had a big, big budget. This one was a studio movie. It should have been a wonderful film. The screenplay might have been a little dodgy, but what really worked against the movie is, I think, after it was shot, certain studio executives wanted to play a more creative role than they already had. So they re-edited the film in a disastrous way. Their “improvements” made half the movie make no sense at all.

HYB: So, this one is more of a question for me. I stumbled across this bit of information a couple nights ago, after viewing Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil. It seems, Stanley cites your novel Shadowland as one of his favorite books, and I read he wrote a screenplay adaptation of it.

Peter Straub: Yes, but I haven’t read it. I knew that he and his people have been taking out one option after another on Shadowland, and they felt they had a very good script and are just hoping to interest a producer or some film star so they can begin to attract the money they’ll need. I certainly wish them luck.

HYB: One more quick question, something fun to wrap up with. What is your favorite horror film?

Peter Straub: What’s my favorite horror film? That’s tough. I’m going to give a good answer. I was just thinking this morning, in fact, that probably my favorite horror film is a really crazy Japanese movie called Visitor Q by the director Takashi Miike.

HYB: Wow. I wasn’t expecting that at all.

Peter Straub: He’s a really oddball Japanese director. He makes a lot of movies. So they’re not polished in a way. And boy oh boy, are they visceral.

HYB: I’m a big fan of his!

Peter Straub: Yeah, it’s an amazing movie. Really, really weird.

HYB: Have you seen his film Gozu? That’s probably my favorite work of his. I can’t even figure out what’s going on in that.

Peter Straub: [Laughs] It’s very strange. I saw it when it first came out here in New York. It’s got a lot of surprises in it.

HYB: Well, thank you, so much for talking with me. This has been really exciting.

It’s my pleasure.

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A Dark Matter

The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present.

Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group’s members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub’s many ardent fans, and win him legions more.