Julia was followed by the 1977 novel If You Could See Me Now, but it was in 1979 with his fifth novel, Ghost Story, that he was catapulted to fame. Ghost Story was made into a 1981 movie of the same title starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, and John Houseman.
The New York Times obituary commented, “Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like Julia (1975) and Ghost Story (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.”
Straub was friendly with author Stephen King, and asked him to write a blurb for Ghost Story, after King read a galley copy of the book. King became enthralled with Straub’s work. “We got it at the post office,’ King recalled. ‘It was all kind of split open. And so I was driving and my wife opened it and she started to read it to me. And by the time we got back to our house, we were both really excited, because we knew that this was sort of a masterwork.”
It was only a couple of years later that Straub suggested to his friend Stephen King that they collaborate on writing a novel. King immediately agreed. The two worked
Stephen King with Peter Straub
together using then state-of-the-art technology, which consisted of computer-linked modems and dot matrix printers. King later said of this collaboration, “He was a better and more literary writer than I was.”
The result of the King-Straub partnership was the wildly successful 1984 novel The Talisman. The November 8, 1984 review by Christopher Lehman- Haupt in the New York Times Book Review began, “What happens when you cross a Stephen King with a Peter Straub? You get talking sea gulls and great balls of nuclear fire that go rolling around the desert like
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