![]() I haven’t read so much horror, but I do know crime fiction. The less highfalutin approach of King or Rice could paradoxically exhibit greater craft, for a significant part of delivering the goods is simply giving the punters what they want. In The NY Times obit, Straub’s occasional collaborator Stephen King says, “He was a better and more literary writer than I was.” This is perhaps true, but while Straub was a bestseller during the horror boom of the ’70s and ’80s, his sophistication did not always work in his favor. Straub had another kind of ambition, a desire to create a vast and subtle canvas, a willingness to let the story defy convention. ![]() Both King and Rice can be summed up reasonably quickly, whereas Straub’s conception requires a bit more time to explain. ![]() His two great contemporaries were Stephen King and Anne Rice. Straub wrote genre fiction, notably horror and crime, but his work strained at the leash. ( The New York Times obit is by Clay Risen.) ![]() Last week the fabulous storyteller Peter Straub passed away at 79. ![]()
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