About This Book
Five old men in the snowbound town of Milburn, New York have spent decades telling each other ghost stories — a ritual that once felt like harmless entertainment. But when one of their circle dies horribly, the survivors begin to understand that something ancient and shapeshifting has fixed its attention on them, drawn by a secret they buried in their youth. Ghost Story builds dread not through jump scares but through accumulation — the creeping sense that guilt has weight, that the past is never fully past, and that the thing hunting them knows exactly who they are.
Straub wrote this novel as a love letter to classic American horror and Gothic literature, and the craft shows on every page. The prose is lush and deliberate, more Henry James than pulp thriller, rewarding readers who lean into its unhurried rhythms. He structures the book like a series of nested tales — stories within stories — so that the line between fiction and nightmare gradually dissolves. It is a novel about storytelling itself, about how we use horror to avoid confronting the real terrors we carry, which gives even its most frightening passages an undercurrent of melancholy that lingers long after the final page.
