I’ve known people so terrified by this book that they threw it out. My first time reading it rendered the same result. The novel gets into your head. You’ll swear things around you will change, or have while you were reading. You’ll never again look at autumn or a heavy snow the same way. Things quite innocent will happen that will scare the shit out of you because it will seem as if you’re living the story.
That was in 1979. My first read. I had nightmares about the story but I was part of it.
I’ve just finished reading it again, and all I can say is, Stephen King liked it, then ended up collaborating with Straub a couple of times. That’s high praise. This is a very worthy read for any horror fan, and a prize for your bookshelf. Forget e versions. Nothing is as good as a printed book, something to touch, smell and experience. At any rate…it still insinuated itself into my nightmares. You’ll forget things about it, and later go back for more. It’s that good.
It begins with a man and a little girl. He keeps driving, not sure what to do with her. She’s tied to him with a rope. He tries to conceal that he kidnapped her when checking into a motel. A suspicious clerk asks her if she is really his daughter. She answers that he is…now.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
I won’t tell you that, but I will tell you the worst thing that happened to me. The most dreadful thing…
The first chapter goes back to the previous fall. A group of elderly men called the Chowder Society get together for brandy and telling horror stories. They take turns. Only one story a night. Sears James, the proper and overbearing member, tells the worst story, a true story, about being a schoolteacher in a small town. What he says is so horrible that the rest of them know they’re going to have nightmares. Afterward, alone, Frederick Hawthorne tells Sears he knows they’re all having bad nightmares even though no one ever says so.
But Ricky Hawthorne feels it. Sears’s story had been the worst so far. He fears that something has been started.
On a clear, crisp New England morning in a colorful autumn, Hawthorne meets young Pete, a high school student on his way to school. Peter will become a major character. Both have no idea that they’re going to face a battle for their lives and the picturesque town of Milburn, New York…
The trouble begins soon enough. The elder son of one Chowder Society member died under suspicious circumstances. Then his father is found dead at a party, his face a mask frozen in horror. The nightmares finally are revealed to each other. They take a vote and it’s decided that the man’s youngest son, a horror fiction writer, will be asked to come to Milburn. They hope that in writing his book, Don Wanderly researched the supernatural and may be of some help to them.
As snow moves in, burying the town in endless storms, things happen that can’t be explained. Sheriff Hagerty gets called to a farm due to a cattle mutilation with no disturbance in the snow around it. In hospital one of two sisters who had a stroke claims she saw her dead brother outside the window.
Ricky Hawthorne and the Chowder Society are aware that things are going on that they have feared for all their adult lives. Even implacable Sears James fights himself to not show fear or acknowledge the conclusions of Ricky, Lewis Benedict and John Jaffrey. But no matter how he tries to make believe it isn’t all connected, he knows better. Jaffrey is killed. Don Wanderly arrives in town. A strange woman checks into a hotel owned by Jim Hardie’s mother. He’s Pete’s best friend but has a knack for getting into trouble. He tells Pete that he saw a blue, unnatural light under her door when she’s in her room and he’s in the hallway. He takes binoculars and they climb to the belfry of the abandoned church across from the hotel. He wants to spy on the beautiful but scary woman. Looking through the binoculars, he says she’s just sitting there smoking. Suddenly he she opens the door into the hallway of the hotel and Hardie gets suspicious that she would go out at such and hour in nasty weather in a town that rolls up the streets at night. He decides they will follow her.
With characters both primary and secondary, and a story that had me sleeping with the lights on, this book became a bestseller. Many still regard it as Peter Straub’s magnum opus. Some still say it’s the best horror story ever written and of course I agree. No book since has ever frightened me because I’ve already seen the best. There’s nothing that will scare you after this book.
Soon, a film was in the works. I saw the trailer and couldn’t wait to see it.
But strange events in my own life had me scared. Whether demons, my imagination or whatever, things from the book seemed to be happening to me.
The film was a grand disappointment. It was beautifully filmed but the fx were already dated. One member of the Chowder Society was omitted. The sheriff barely makes an appearance. Even the true reason for the terrorism of the town was changed. Pete and Jim aren’t in it. The ending is flat compared to the book’s climax. Don Wanderly is miscast with Craig Wasson taking the role as is Alice Krige as the antagonist is the worst casting choice in Hollywoodhistory. There were so many better choices. However, casting for the Chowder Society is perfect. John Houseman is Sears James, Fred Astaire is Ricky Hawthorne, Melvyn Douglass is Jaffrey and finally Douglass Fairbanks Jr. rounds out a casting job never to be equaled. But Fred Astaire didnt like the role no matter how perfect he was for the Hawthorne character. He was scared. Perhaps he had sampled the book, or been given a synopsis; at any rate he at one point wanted very desperately to leave the cast. He was terrified that he would die, maybe even get murdered during filming.
The story gave the film great potential but was squandered. It’s still worth a view, though. Even as it is, it’s creepy in the right places.
I recommend this extraordinary book as a great diversion while you’re locked inside againstthe coronavirus.
In fact, Straub magnificently and deftly used men’s instinctive fear of women, and it’s effective.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 