In horror, anything can happen, and the quietest moments resonate with overpowering dread. Few have taken terror to the literary heights of Peter Straub, whose trio of chilling books gathered in Three Novels of the 1970s established him as a modern master of the American gothic.

Below, volume editor Emma Straub—an acclaimed novelist and Peter’s daughter—reflects on the innate appeal of all things scary, the writing lessons her father passed down, and the brilliant sequence of Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and Ghost Story. As he refined his unique style across these influential novels, Straub, Michael Chabon writes, “restored the literature of horror and the uncanny to its rightful place at the heart of the American canon.”

Library of America: What was it like being the child of a horror writer?

Emma Straub: I was very little, in preschool, when I really started thinking about what my dad did for a living. I knew he walked me to school and hung out for as long as possible, sitting around with me and all my friends talking to us about how we were mermaids. He would just tell stories and eventually the teachers would be like, “Peter, you have to go now.” He was the best dressed of all my friends’ parents who had regular jobs. He was a big guy, so a lot of his stuff, especially in the 1990s, was like custom Armani, and he always looked amazing.

Peter and Emma Straub (Courtesy of Emma Straub)

As I got older, I understood that my father’s stories were kind of scary. My house growing up was full of scary stuff, whether it was movie posters or pieces of art or book jackets or tiny skulls—the bric-a-brac of a horror writer.

I first read one of my father’s books [Koko] when I was about ten. I took one of his paperbacks to summer camp and read about Vietnam and serial killers and people with ears on a necklace—you know, all that fun stuff. But even then, I understood that he had discovered that fiction was a safe, perfect container for everything scary, every bad thing that had ever happened to him. It was a place for him to process and transform all of that.

I was brought up to see. . . that scary things happen in books and movies because scary things happen in real life.

Anyone who knows horror writers knows they are the goofiest people in any room, the silliest, the funniest, the most irreverent. That’s how my father was—not just light and funny, but a joyous person to be around. And I understood, starting when I was probably a teenager, that this was not in spite of his work, but because of it, and was in some ways the other side of it.

LOA: How was it to revisit these three novels for the LOA edition? Did you make any interesting discoveries?

ES: So, the story of Julia is really funny, and I didn’t know it until I was working on the chronology for this edition with my mom. My father wrote an early novel, Under Venus, that he tried to sell and couldn’t, and it was suggested to him that he write something sort of gothic, something scary. There was a woman who lived on my parents’ street whose name was Julia. He didn’t even change this lady’s name!

I think he could have written two dozen literary novels, easily. But with Julia, and the permission to go in that direction, he was able to channel things that happened to him as a child and create something no one else could. The older I get as a novelist, those are the books I love the most, where you think, “No one else could have written this.”

First edition covers of Julia (1975), If You Could See Me Now (1977), and Ghost Story (1979)

After he discovered that freedom, he started to turn it on things he was interested in or obsessed by. There’s the farm his mother grew up on in western Wisconsin that appears in If You Could See Me Now. And then Ghost Story makes me think of all these rooms that my father wanted to be in. He went to this extremely posh prep school in Milwaukee where he was one of two scholarship students. He was horrified by all these jerky rich kids, and so jealous of their clothes, their houses, their vacations, everything that came along with the money. And to me, these old codgers in Ghost Story, that’s what they are, and my dad is saying, “Look at what’s underneath this sheen of gentility!”

LOA: Peter Straub edited a few Library of America volumes: the H. P. Lovecraft: Tales volume and a two-volume collection of fantastic tales. Who were his core influences as a writer and what did he like to read?

ES: He read everything: commercial thrillers and esoteric poetry and everything in between. It’s a miracle he wrote as many books as he did, honestly, between all the books he was reading. But he needed them and they fed him, and he never lost his curiosity. He was always interested in young writers, across all different genres. I have heard from so many writers who say, “I was just this horror writer kid and I wrote to your dad and he was so nice and he wrote back and then we became pen pals for the next fifteen years.”

It was a great gift, growing up with my dad, that I’m really not intimidated by many people, especially novelists—not a very intimidating bunch, by and large. I know what they all do, which is sit in a room by themselves most of the time. And they’re all happy to have someone say kind words to them. They’re not movie stars, thank goodness.

Peter Straub: Three Novels of the 1970s

Henry James was my dad’s number one, but he also loved D. H. Lawrence. My dad was briefly in a Ph.D. program in Dublin and his thesis was supposed to be on D. H. Lawrence, but his professor, after reading an early version, advised him to write a novel instead. Then my parents moved to London and were surrounded by poets. In terms of the poets he loved, John Ashbery was tip top.

My dad read books like they were oxygen. From the time he was a small child until the day he died, he never went anywhere without a book. If he was coming to your house for Thanksgiving dinner, he would bring a big fat book just in case things got boring. Whenever I want to look for a book I don’t have on my shelf, I just go to my parents’ apartment and it’s there.

LOA: Reading Ghost Story, there’s such ambition, with all these voices being marshaled simultaneously, and it shows a very adventurous and omnivorous imagination. What were your father’s feelings about genre? Did he bristle at being thought of as a horror writer?

ES: Without betraying him, I think I can say yes, he did bristle. But when I’m in his office and looking at all the awards he won—and he won every genre award possible, over and over again—I feel he understood how deeply appreciated he was.

My parents have a story about how Stephen King got an award one year from the National Book Awards, a prize for literary citizenship, and the writer Shirley Hazzard was so offended. She thought it cheapened the whole thing. But my parents went, the Kings bought a bunch of tables, and so there was this fleet of horror writers at this fancy gala.

Peter Straub, Benjamin Straub, and Stephen King in London, 1977 (peterstraub.net)

I think that attitude is changing now. The lines are less firm. If you look at someone like Colson Whitehead or Marlon James, these are writers who can be a bit more slippery in terms of genre. I have writer friends I know have not read my father’s work because it’s horror, and I just have to think, “You absolute fool!” Anyone who takes the time to read his work would understand the level at which he was writing.

When I was in college, I took a literary criticism class that I hated so much, but the professor was fantastic and he had us read ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. For the first time in my college career, I saw classmates sitting out on the quad reading their homework as if it was a great pleasure, which of course it was. Then we would get into the classroom and they would rip it apart. So for my big final project for that class, I wrote to my dad and Stephen King and every other genre writer I knew and asked them all these questions about genre distinctions and judgment. That was basically me giving the middle finger to everyone in my class who was loving these books but didn’t want to be seen as taking them seriously.

Watch Peter Straub Discuss His Work on Dark Dreamers (via YouTube)

LOA: Horror is so fun. It can be terrifying and fill you with unpleasant emotions, but it’s also compulsively entertaining and just sucks you in. How does that work?

ES: It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, because my son is really into scary stuff. He’s exactly like my dad, only he’s thirteen years old. It’s been interesting to navigate. I am delighted for him to read anything he wants, but sometimes his friends come over and we have to talk about whether it’s OK to watch these serial killer movies.

One of my favorite contemporary horror novelists is Grady Hendrix, who is just the bee’s knees and so much fun. And then there’s the stuff that I can’t read, which I’ll just call “the Swedish stuff,” where you’re like, “Oh, the cover is just blood.” To me that’s not fun, but to other people, that’s what they love.

Horror contains so much of the human experience. I was brought up to see it that way, that scary things happen in books and movies because scary things happen in real life. And I think that especially now, speaking as a parent, there’s a whole lot of messaging that says don’t show your children scary things so they’ll never know that scary things exist—when of course that’s not true.

Clippings of articles on Peter Straub from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Village Voice (peterstraub.net)

LOA: Do you have a favorite of your father’s works? Where would you recommend somebody start with his novels?

ES: Ghost Story is the easy answer in this volume; that’s where he really figured himself out as a writer. He understood what he wanted to do, and he just absolutely did it. It’s such a beautifully written book, and so complicated, and full of these hallmarks of his career, like doubling and class. And it’s scary. It feels like something from a previous century. But his work was so wide-ranging that there really are different things for every reader.

LOA: You are yourself an acclaimed novelist. What did your father teach you about the life of a writer?

ES: That’s the greatest gift that my father gave me, and this is unfortunately true of parenting in general: it’s not what you say, it’s what you do. And what I saw him do was work. He would get up, put on a suit, go up to his office, which was at the top of our house, and he would blast his music, either jazz or opera, and work all day long. Then he would have dinner—we always had dinner together as a family—and after that he would go back to his office and work until the middle of the night, long after I went to bed.

So that’s what I saw. I saw how much he read and I saw how much he worked. When I went to my MFA program when I was in my mid-twenties, what I discovered was that there were a lot of writers who were pretty interested in sitting around and getting drunk with each other (which my dad did plenty of, to be clear). But I was like, “What are they doing?” That is not what being a writer is; it’s not the 1950s anymore! No, being a writer is sitting your butt in a chair and being focused.

I certainly do it differently than my dad did. I’m a mom, for one, and I don’t like to stay up late. But otherwise it’s really the same. I like to be on a schedule and I like to work and I want to be prolific. I don’t want to take ten years to write a book, I want to write a book so I can write the next book, so I can write the next book. And it’s not about publishing these books, but about writing the books. That’s the best part.

Straub at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2014 (peterstraub.net)

Emma Straub is the author of six novels, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, All Adults Here, This Time Tomorrow, and American Fantasy, the story collection Other People We Married, and three picture books for children.