Peter Straub Biography
(1943– ), If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story, Shadow Land, Floating Dragon, The Talisman, Koko
American novelist, born in Milwaukee, educated at the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and University College, Dublin. His first books were acute psychological studies, but he is best known for his horror novels such as If You Could See Me Now (1977), and Ghost Story (1979), which has been filmed. In these books, he manipulated the horror genre's crude obsession with the past into a subtle series of confrontations of guilt-ridden protagonists with their own ancient fears. Shadow Land (1980) and Floating Dragon (1983) were fantasies, as was The Talisman (1984), written with S. King. Koko (1988), Mystery (1989), and The Throat (1993) were complex thrillers in which the supernatural rhetoric of his earlier work is less marked.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: St Juliot Cornwall to Rabindranath Tagore Biography