Description
Book Synopsis Horror novelist Peter Straub creates highly personalized fiction with an allusiveness and ambiguity that deny the genre''s explicit nature. For him, the Gothic style is to be created and recreated in a changing world--Faustian pacts, buried secrets, haunted places, ghosts, vampires and succubi take on strange new shapes and effects. Stephen King describes Straub''s style as a synthesis of horror and beauty.
Drawing on interviews with Straub and featuring an exclusive interview with King, this study explores the work of the author who has been called a writer of rare wit and intelligence in a field beset with cynical potboilers (Douglas E. Winter, Washington Post, October 14, 1984).
Trade ReviewTibbetts brings a poet's sensibility to the field, creating a synthesis of horror and beauty. He writes a beautiful prose line that features narrative clarity, sterling characterization, and surprising bursts of humor"". - Stephen King
""With The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub, John Tibbetts makes a major contribution to the study of one of America's finest, most underrated novelists. Approaching Straub's complex body of work from a variety of thematic and literary perspectives, Tibbetts has written an intelligent, highly readable volume that no future Straub scholar can afford to ignore. This is an important-and very necessary-book."" - Bill Sheehan,
At the Foot of the Story Tree""Peter Straub has created a literary form all of his own, mating the macabre with the magical, interweaving the psychological with the uncanny, illuminating the dark side of humanity with the light of the fantastic. His vision is profoundly personal, his prose enviably elegant. Constantly surprising, his work invigorates and enriches the imagination, and it deserves to be savoured like the finest vintage."" - Ramsey Campbell,
Ancient Images, Incarnate
