From Julia: Almost immediately, she saw the blonde girl again. The child was sitting on the ground at some distance from a group of other children, boys and girls who were carefully watching her . . . . The blonde girl was working intently at something with her hands, wholly concentrated on it. Her face was sweetly serious . . . . This was what gave the scene the aspect of a performance . . . . The girl was seated, her legs straight out before her, in the sandy overspill from one of the sandboxes . . . . She was speaking softly now to her audience, ranged on the scrubby grass before her in groups of three and four . . . . They were certainly unnaturally quiet, completely taken up by the girl's theatrics.
Is it this little girl, who is holding her audience spellbound by cutting up a turtle before their eyes, the same little girl who accompanies Don Wanderley on his strange trip south from Milburn, New York, to Panama City, Florida? This is the little girl as Don first sees her. You decide.
And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared in the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractive-she was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her . . . perhaps children were quicker at seeing real differences than adults . . . . Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic's desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.
Julia, in the book of the same name, speaks to a small black child about the unnamed girl who has mutilated the turtle. The black girl wanders over to Julia and begins the conversation by asking: "What's your name?” "Julia.” The girl's mouth opened a fraction wider.
"Doolya?” Julia raised her hand for a moment to the child's springy ruff of hair. "What's your name?” "Mona.” "Do you know the girl who was just playing in here? The girl with the blonde hair who was sitting and talking?” Mona nodded. "Do you know her name?” Mona nodded again. "Doolya.” "Julia?” "Mona. Take me with you.” "Mona, what was that girl doing? Was she telling a story?” "She does. Things." The girl blinked.
In Ghost Story , Don Wanderley similarly speaks with another child about the child who so disturbs him: "What's the name of that girl?" He asked, pointing.
The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said "Angie.” "Angie what?” "Don't know.” "Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?” The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupped his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's awful .” Another theme which runs through both novels-a very Henry Jamesian theme-is the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us. Even in their terror, Straub's characters recognize the kinship. In their appearance, his ghosts, like the ghosts James, Wharton, and M. R. James conjure up, are Freudian. Only in their final exorcism do Straub's ghosts become truly inhuman-emissaries from the world of "outside evil." When Julia asks Mona the name of the turtle-killing little girl, Mona gives back her own name ("Doolya," she says). And when, in Ghost Story , Don Wanderley tries to ascertain who this eerie little girl is, this disquieting exchange follows: "Okay, let's try again," he said. "What are you?” For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier; she did not look any less adult.
"You know," she said.
He insisted. "What are you?” She smiled all through her amazing response. "I am you.” "No. I am me. You are you.” "I am you.” Ghost Story is at first glance an extravagant mishmash of every horror and gothic convention ever yarned in all those B-pictures we've just finished talking about. There are animal mutilations. There's demon possession (Gregory Bate, a secondary villain, battens upon his younger sister, who escapes, and his younger brother . . . who doesn't). There's vampirism, ghoulishness (in the literal sense of that word; Gregory dines on his victims after they're dead), and werewolvery of a most singular and frightening sort. Yet all of these fearsome legends are really only the outer shell of the novel's real heart, where there stands a woman who may be Eva Galli . . . or Alma Mobley . . . or Anna Mostyn . . . or possibly a little girl in a dirty pink dress whose name, supposedly, is Angie Maule. What are you? Don asks. I am you, she responds. And that is where the heartbeat of this extraordinary book seems the strongest. What is the ghost, after all, that it should frighten us so, but our own face? When we observe it we become like Narcissus, who was so struck by the beauty of his own reflection that he lost his life. We fear the Ghost for much the same reason we fear the Werewolf: it is the deep part of us that need not be bound by piffling Apollonian restrictions. It can walk through walls, disappear, speak in the voices of strangers. It is the Dionysian part of us . . . but it is still us.
Straub seems aware that he is carrying a basket dangerously overloaded with horrors, and turns the fact splendidly to his own advantage. The characters themselves feel that they have entered a horror story; the protangonist, Don Wanderley, is a writer of horror stories, and within the town of Milburn, New York, which becomes the world of this novel, there is the smaller world of Clark Mulligan's Rialto Theater, which is showing a horror-movie festival during the book's progress: a microcosm within the macrocosm. In one of the book's key scenes Gregory Bate throws one of the book's good guys, young Peter Barnes, through the movie screen while Night of the Living Dead is showing in the empty theater. The town of Milburn has become snowed in and overrun with the living dead, and at this point Barnes is literally thrown into the movie. It shouldn't work; it should be overt and cute. But Straub's firm prose maker it work. It preserves Straub's hall-of-mirrors approach (three of the book's epigrams are Straub's own free rendering of the Narcissus story), which keeps us constantly aware that the face looking out of all those mirrors is also the face looking in; the book suggests we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.* Is this really such a difficult or paradoxical idea when you consider how short our lives are in a wider life-scheme where redwoods live two thousand years and the Galapagos sea turtles may live for a thousand?
Most of Ghost Story 's power comes from the fact that of the four archetypes we have discussed, the Ghost is the most potent. The concept of the Ghost is to the good novel of the supernatural what the concept of the Mississippi is to Twain's Huckleberry Finn -really more than symbol or archetype, it is a major part of that myth-pool in which we all must bathe. "Don't you want to hear about the manifestations of the different spirits in her?" the younger priest asks the older before they go up to Regan MacNeil before the final confrontation in The Exorcist . He begins to enumerate them, and Father Merrin cuts him off curtly: "There is only one.” And although Ghost Story clanks and roars with the trappings of vampirism and werewolvery and flesh-eating ghouls, there is really only Alma/Anna/Ann-Veronica . . . and little Angie Maule. She is described by Don Wanderley as a shape-changer (what the Indians called a manitou), but even this is a branch rather than the taproot; all of these manifestations are like the up cards in a hand of stud poker. When we turn over the hole card, the one that makes the hand, we find the central card of our Tarot hand: the Ghost.
We know that ghosts aren't inherently evil-in fact, most of us have heard or read of a case or cases where ghosts have been rather helpful; the shade who told Auntie Clarissa not to take that plane or who warned Grampy Vic to go home fast because the house was catching on fire. My mother told me that after suffering a near -fatal heart attack, a close friend of hers had a visit from Jesus Christ in his hospital room. Jesus just opened the door of Emil's I.C. room and asked him how he was doing. Emil allowed as how he was afraid he was a goner, and asked Jesus if He had come to take him. "Not yet,” Jesus said, leaning casually against the door. "You've got another six years in you. Relax." He then left. Emil recovered. That was in 1953; I heard the story from my mother around 1957.
*At one point, while under strain, Don gives a long, rambling lecture to an undergraduate class on the subject of Stephen Crane. In the course of his talk he describes The Red Badge of Courage as "a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears." Considering the book's moody approach to the subjects of cowardice and bravery, it is an oddly apt description of that novel.
Emil died in 1959-six years after his heart attack.
I have even had some truckle with "good ghosts" in my own work; near the end of The Stand , Nick Andros, a character who has been killed earlier in an explosion, returns to tell half-witted but good-hearted Tom Cullen how to care for the novel's hero, Stu Redman, after Stu has fallen gravely ill with pneumonia. But for the purposes of the horror novel the ghosts must be evil, and as a result we find ourselves back in a familiar place: examining the Apollonian/ Dionysian conflict and watching for the mutant.
In Ghost Story , Don Wanderley is summoned by four old men who call themselves the Chowder Society. Don's uncle, the fifth member, died of an apparent heart attack the year before while attending a party thrown for the mysterious actress Ann-Veronica Moore. As with all good gothics, a summary of the plot beyond this basic situation would be unfair-not because the veteran reader of this material will find much that is new in the plot (it would be surprising if he, she, or we did, in light of Straub's intention to fuse as many of the classic ghost story elements as possible), but because a bare summary of any gothic makes the book look absurdly complex and labored. Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.
Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothic- it's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!). The writing itself is beautifully tuned and balanced.