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Straub, Peter

(1943-2022) US author who focused throughout his long career on horror novels, most of them ambitious, and almost always fantastic (see Fantastika; Horror in SF), but using very few sf agencies at any point. His collaboration with Stephen King in the Talisman sequence comprising The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001) verges on sf, however, when its characters enter Underground into a Parallel World cognate with that depicted in King's solo Dark Tower. Straub wrote relatively little short fiction, his first story being The General's Wife (May 1982 Twilight Zone; 1982); Interior Darkness: Selected Stories (coll 2016) assembles a significant range of tales from between 1985 and 2013, some of them of novella length.

Some of Straub's mid-period works, such as the World Fantasy Award-winning Koko (1988), which initiated the Blue Rose sequence, are nonfantastic tales of crime and retribution; the central continuing protagonist of the series is the author Tim Underhill. The savage Godgame manipulations inflicted by Underhill on his characters in the subsequent Underhill sequence, comprising lost boy lost girl (2003) and In the Night Room (2004), are at points Equipoisal with more traditional sf exercises in immurement; the Pocket Universe which encloses at least one of these characters is reminiscent in its cruel imprisoning claustrophobia of Margaret St Clair's Agent of the Unknown (1956 dos). A sense that as his career advanced, Straub increasingly tended to gnomic juxtapositions of material from the overall toolkit of Fantastika, is strengthened through the publication of an apparent fragment like Perdido: A Fragment from a Work in Progress (2015 chap), where disjunct thrusts of story-types muscularly create a vision both raddled and encompassing (see Gothic SF). Though never completed, What Happens in Hello Jack (2025) and Wreckage (2025) – the first comprising notes and fragments partially elucidative of the expansive 450 pages of the second – tantalizingly places into unresolved proximity Jack the Ripper and Henry James.

Straub won numerous horror and dark fantasy awards, among them a World Fantasy Award for his Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (anth 2009). His honours for life achievement include a Bram Stoker Award in 2006, an International Horror Guild Award in 2008 and a further World Fantasy Award in 2010. [JC]

further awards or honours: Readercon.

see also: Arthur Machen.

Peter Francis Straub

born Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 2 March 1943

died New York: 4 September 2022

works

series

Talisman

Blue Rose

Underhill

individual titles

collections and stories

poetry

nonfiction

works as editor

about the author

links

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 18:18 pm on 16 July 2026.
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