Horror writer turns to novellas with ease

'I've been working away at a new novel without finishing it,” Peter Straub said in a phone interview from his office in Brooklyn. A combination of health issues and thorny narrative challenges have slowed the author's efforts. 'It occurred to me I'd been a long time without a book, and I wanted to have a new book.”

No doubt his large fan base, which includes readers who have enjoyed his novels and stories since the early 1970s, would welcome a new book, too. But what should it be?

The idea of publishing a volume of his collected short stories had appeal. 'They have a certain gravity to them,” Straub said of books that collect an author's entire body of short work.

But his agent pointed out that a single volume wouldn't be sufficient to collect all of Straub's work. So, the author went to work making selections.

'It wasn't easy,” he said. 'I have stories that are clear favorites of mine and other stories that I'm very fond of.” Straub's choices among his favorites have been published as 'Interior Darkness” (see related review).

The winnowing was aided by the similarity of some of his stories. For example, he left out a story entitled 'Bunny is Good Bread” because 'that story had too much in common with a shorter story called ‘The Juniper Tree,'” which is included in 'Interior Darkness.”

Issues of length were part of the challenge of putting the collection together. While some of the stories are less than a page in length, several others are novellas.

Novellas - longer than a story but shorter than a novel - are perhaps Straub's favorite form. 'I love working with novellas,” he said. 'It's a great length. You can spend a summer on it. You don't spend your life on it.”

Straub's oeuvre is generally categorized, somewhat imprecisely, as 'horror.” But as 'Interior Darkness” demonstrates, the genre is broad and deep.

When he was starting out, 'the field seemed kind of wide open, and it looked to me that you could speak to a lot of readers if you could unlock those emotions,” he said, suggesting that if you can make readers feel fear they will come to love you for it.

But the proliferation of the genre in the 1980s had Straub bristling a bit about the categorization. 'Horror novels were all over the place. Most of that stuff was no good. The reputation of this historically valid and interesting little genre took a nosedive.”

In addition, Straub rightly felt that pigeonholing his diverse body of working into the horror genre was reductive. Nevertheless, Straub has made his peace with being identified as a horror writer. 'The grown up point of view was that if these books were horror, then horror covered a lot ground.”

And, Straub argues, a gifted writer is hardly limited by the tropes of a given category. 'I really think that good writing in genres tends to go outside of the genre eventually.”

Among the stories in 'Interior Darkness,” Straub points to 'Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff” and 'The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” - two stories that 'allude to torture fairly directly” - as 'more like me than like any other writer on earth.” He suggested, for example, that neither Lawrence Block nor Stephen King, two writers Straub greatly admires, would pen stories like these two. 'They are kind of in my wheelhouse, as they say, in my tonal range.”

While the story collection offers new readers and longtime fans an opportunity to explore the scope of Straub's writing, he continues to work on the new novel. 'It's a very strange whirligig of a book,” Straub said, and there are still a lot of decisions to make and writing to do before the book will be completed.

'It will be fun,” the author said. 'It will be an ambitious book when I'm done.”