The Opening Lines of Peter Straub's Ghost Story

This article contains spoilers for Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who first came to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story thanks to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.

King, who would go on to collaborate with Straub on two and a half novels¹, not only discusses the novel in depth as one of the absolute peaks of the 1970s horror boom, he chooses its first line as one of the epigraphs for his treatment of the genre as a whole:

What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?

I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me … the most dreadful thing …

In King’s afterword to the latest edition of Ghost Story, he calls it the second-best opening line of any book. It’s always grabbed me as well: it’s common to refer to first lines as hooks, and this hook sinks in deep. Before I revisited it for this article, I hadn’t read Ghost Story in at least twenty years, but this line, coupled with a sense of how it functions in the novel as a whole, came back to me often.

Great first lines can tell us a lot. This is, despite the italics and lack of quotation marks, a conversation, not an inner monologue, and it’s an intimate conversation. Not the kind of question you ask to break the ice, unless you’re much more fearless at parties than I am. The questioner is putting his respondent—the identities will become clear later—on the spot, and the latter does not take offense or devolve into sputtering but draws a line and pivots: he will answer a related, but easier, question instead. His flexibility tells us that the conversation is the point of the exercise, for what matters here is that he tells something; this interrogation is not after anything specific. That the easier question is still profoundly personal emphasizes the sense of relationship even further.

The second man (Dr. John Jaffrey, we later learn) doesn’t hesitate to tell the first (Ricky Hawthorne, one of our two primary protagonists) about the worst thing that ever happened to him—but he still needs to be lured into speaking at all, which means that against all odds, this exchange is a kind of icebreaker after all: we eventually find that it takes place at the first meeting of their informal storytelling club, The Chowder Society, after the death of one of their closest friends. The atmosphere in the room is so thick with grief and confusion that Ricky will remember John as having “saved them all” by answering and providing the night’s story against all odds.

But John, we see here, is willing to be candid only about a passive experience. He can tell how he was done and done by, but not what he’s done. He is afraid, as it turns out—the Chowder Society’s amorphous terror hovers over the earlier parts of the novel like a fog—and one of the things he fears is bringing his own past deeds to light.

So we open with provocation, friendship, courage, fear … and a dodge of responsibility. It’s one thing to say you won’t confess your worst act; it’s another to offer up your worst experience instead. I will paint a completely different picture of myself; I’ll talk only of my suffering, not of anyone I may have made to suffer. The slight ripple of unease of that particular recalibration, too, is present from the start.

What Straub reveals only later is that such a dodge is stranger than it may seem: “Did I ever tell you that I started everything by asking John about the worst thing he’d ever done?” Ricky tells Don Wanderley, the young horror author the Chowder Society has brought into their midst as a kind of consultant,

He said he wouldn’t tell me, and he told me a ghost story instead. Well, I should have known better. I knew what the worst thing was. We all knew.

The worst thing any of them ever did, it turns out, they all did together.

“Then why did you ask?” Don asks, and Ricky’s answer, in short, is that he had already made John’s pivot in his own mind: he was too distracted by his loss to remember his crime even as he alluded to it.

In 1929, we learn, the Chowder Society–very young men years and years before they would be the aging lions of their small upstate New York town, telling stories to each other in cozy parlors—committed a peculiar kind of murder. More properly, it was manslaughter—an outpouring of violence, appalled horror, and profound disappointment at Eva Galli, a woman who’d come down off the pedestal, which they’d erected for her, to get drunk, snarling, vicious, and sexually voracious.

At first glance, it’s a complex and painful scene. Eva, whose fiancé has died—bleeding to death after shoving both his arms in a mechanical thresher—is, in one light, furious at the conventional town that’s been shunning her throughout her grief and especially at the young men, her worshipers and so-called friends, who have obeyed the rules of polite society rather than pay a now-single woman a call in her bereavement. Fuck them, Eva thinks, and fuck them is what she literally tries to do, crossing the line in the process. They want her to stop, they ask her to stop, and she doesn’t.

But the terror of Eva’s sexual assault on all of them is described thusly,

It looked like she was eating half his face. … It must have been like kissing a razor. When she drew back her head, Lewis’s face was smeared with lipstick … as if he was smeared with blood.

While it’s a rough scene that even includes Lewis, still in his teens (“I want Lewis first. Because my little Lewis is so pretty”), it’s nonetheless inflected by the Chowder Society’s collective fear of female sexuality.² “There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging … acting like a whore,” one character says. She sexually bullies them, calling them sissies and pansies, and they’re not offended but revolted and betrayed.

Lewis kills her with an impulsive tackle that knocks her head against the fireplace, and the rest of them, with up-and-coming careers to think of, all cover up her death, turning a horror into a secret. It is Eva’s ghost at the heart of Ghost Story, reappearing to all the men—and to some, like Don and his brother, who are simply connected to them—in various A.M.-initialed guises over the years until she finally forces an apocalyptic showdown in a quiet, snowed-in Milburn. Straub says in Danse Macabre that he read Hawthorne to prepare for writing this book, and this could have a familiar message out of Hawthorne’s own dark Puritanism: Be sure your sins will find you out. The worst thing you ever did, the thing you couldn’t talk about, has come back to haunt you.

But Straub, in a peculiar way, out-dodges even John and Ricky. Eva Galli is already an ageless, shapeshifting monster before her 1929 run-in with the besotted Chowder Society; instead of grieving her fiancé’s death, she provoked it for kicks, as she’d provoked countless other deaths over the years. Admittedly, it’s bad when you incur the wrath of a shapeshifter with a retinue of undead werewolf-like ghouls and the ability to summon elaborate, hallucinatory visions. But, from a different angle, this is also sort of the best-case scenario for killing a woman. As it turns out, they had no obligation to empathize with her as a fellow person, and their empathy wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. Oh, it’s okay: she was a monster.

There is something about this slipperiness that suits Straub’s precise, unemotional, buttoned-up style.³ He writes like a gentleman, and the men of the Chowder Society are all gentlemen, the courteous and well-to-do aristocrats of their small society—though the murder that sparks their “haunting” happens on the wrong side of the tracks, at an apartment that one of them temporarily rented for a kind of bohemian thrill. By the time the novel catches up to them, their crime has become an abstraction even they seldom think of. What sticks out for them, then? For all of the horror that Straub catalogs here, what he summons most viscerally is the gentleman’s fear of embarrassment. One mustn’t lose face.

It’s why some of his finest and most intense writing comes in the opening section, a bleakly vivid flash-forward where Don has kidnapped a little girl he suspects is Eva’s latest incarnation and is on a nightmarish cross-country tour with her as he tries to decide if he can kill her after all. He’s the one who remembers hearing about the exchange that opens the text, because he’s currently living in the tension between Ricky’s question and John’s answer. When he stops with “Angie” to get food and the store owner, an ex-cop, starts to mess with him and then twigs to how jumpy he is, the tension is sublime. I feel like I’m Don, getting lightheaded with panic as I hear, “You don’t look much like that girl.” That girl, who could say anything.

Interestingly, though, Don’s narration denies the significance of the opening lines to his current predicament, thinking:

What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you? That you took off your clothes at night beside the bed of a nine-year-old girl? That you were holding a knife? That the knife wanted to kill her?

He then answers, “No. Other things were worse.” What he doesn’t consciously distinguish is that worse things have happened to him, but these are things he’s doing.

Don. You’re a writer. Look at the subject-verb combinations here.

But this is only appropriate. Don is a newly minted member of the Chowder Society himself, and so denial is the way to go. Not only that, it works.

Straub, quoted in Danse Macabre, said he patterned Ghost Story after King’s ’Salem’s Lot, and the contrast between their initial flash forwards is illuminating in that regard. King, whose character relationships are more conventional but conveyed with more emotional heat, begins with Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, now almost father and son, in Mexico. There’s no blood relationship between them and no official adoption paperwork, but everyone can reliably tell the tenderness between them is safe and appropriate. They might be killed by vampires, but they’re not going to be humiliated, and their intentions towards each other are good. Their adoptive parent-child love is real. It’s a solemn and intriguing intro, but it has none of the bite and tension of Straub’s opening salvo.

But what it does have are consequences. Ben and Mark are both living in the wake of massive personal grief, and they’re essentially exiles; ‘Salem’s Lot was Mark’s home, and it no longer exists in any recognizable form. (In the epilogue, they return only to destroy it and the vampires that remain there.) They’re healing, and they have each other, but there’s no sense that things are okay now. Maybe they never will be.

Don’s prologue feels like it’s in that vein to begin with. He’s broke, and he’s risking his safety, reputation, and conscience to try to address a lingering supernatural menace. But by the epilogue, Straub rescues him from this predicament even more than Don rescues himself. He doesn’t have to kill Eva Galli in the shape of nine-year-old “Angie Maule,” let alone risk getting it wrong; she transforms into a form which he has fewer compunctions about attacking—and what does it mean that that form is a black man, Dr. Rabbitfoot, whom Don himself invented as a fictional horror antagonist? The decision to relieve Don of his anxieties by this particular transformation is more loaded than Straub can unpack in the closing pages of a (predominantly white) horror novel. Imagine a production of Hamlet where Claudius turned into Dr. Rabbitfoot to menace our tormented Dane—but also help make up his mind, a decision that, in ’70s white America, was only going to go one way.

Don will not be embarrassed by a dead girl in his car as it sinks into the water, mirroring the disposal of Eva’s body so long ago; Dr. Rabbitfoot is all there is, and he shrinks and shrivels as the Eva-manitou displaces herself one final time into the body of a wasp, a pest that can be safely and definitively squashed without incident or fear. Earlier, strangers, especially strangers with ties to law enforcement, were a particular terror to Don, but the novel ends with him making relieved small talk with a security guard over how thoroughly he struck back at that hard-to-kill wasp. He’s at ease again:

“For a guy whose car is turning into salt rust, you look awful happy,” the guard said.

“Yes,” Don answered. “Yes, I am. Don’t ask me to explain it.”

He’s a gentleman once more, a middle-class white man in America, who feels safe, who knows that he’s done the right thing, and who doesn’t have to answer any questions that he doesn’t want to no matter how odd he’s acting.

We open Ghost Story with a dodged question between friends, and we close with a dodged question between strangers, but everything in the end was there in the beginning. All the strengths of Ghost Story—its prose, its layered intelligence, its complexity, its dark set pieces—are implied there, and all its weaknesses–its moral claustrophobia, its embedded conservative streak, and its reluctance to take visceral risks–are there as well. It’s not only an excellent opening, it’s a perfectly representative one.

1. The Talisman and Black House, with the forthcoming Other Worlds Than These debuting this year, some time after Straub’s death, alas, with the benefits of his notes but not his prose. ↩︎
2. One could write a whole separate essay on women in Ghost Story, even outside of Eva Galli and her various manifestations. Straub tries, at least, and I shouldn’t punish him simply because him doing better than many of his contemporaries makes me wish he had somehow managed to do even better still. ↩︎
3. As King notes in Danse Macabre, Straub lived in England for many years, and his writing has some of the cool, mannered quality of a certain kind of English prose. Of Straub’s earlier novel Julia, he says, “There is no sense of the Grand Guignol in the book, although the book’s most vital suggestion certainly suggests it,” and Ghost Story likewise has a gift for handling lurid scenarios without disrupting a fundamental sense of order and taste. ↩︎