Ghost Story.

Published in 1979, Ghost Story is widely regarded as Peter Straub's masterpiece and one of the foundational works of the modern American horror novel, ranking with the early fiction of Stephen King in establishing the literary seriousness of the genre in the late twentieth century. Straub later recalled that the book began as a result of his reading of classic American supernatural fiction, including King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot: "I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of Lovecraft and a lot of the books by his 'set' - this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the field - I also read Bierce, Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot of Europeans... The first thing I thought of was having a bunch of old men tell stories to each other - and then I hoped I could think of some device that would link all the stories. I very much like the idea of stories set down in novels - a lot of my life seems to have been spent listening to older people tell me stories about their families, their youth, and all the rest. And it seemed like a formal challenge." Out of that challenge came Milburn, a fictional town in upstate New York where four elderly gentlemen - a lawyer, a doctor, and two retired men of letters - have for decades gathered as the Chowder Society to pass winter evenings telling one another ghost stories. Their ritual, half-amusement and half-confession, conceals a terrible secret from their younger days, an act long buried whose consequences now begin to return for them in the form of a presence that wears human faces but is something altogether older and more malign. As the snows close in on Milburn and the deaths begin, Straub weaves the inheritances of Hawthorne, James, Machen, and the rest into a long, intricately structured narrative that is at once a homage to the classic ghost story and a sustained meditation on guilt, memory, and the unfinished business of the past. Adapted to film by John Irvin in 1981, the novel won the World Fantasy Award and remains one of the most artistically ambitious horror novels ever written in English.