Peter Straub's second foray into the horror genre, and i find it odd that I haven't read it, being such a big fan of his stuff when I was a teenager. Nowadays I prefer his later books, the Blue Rose trilogy and The Hellfire Club, big, chunky literate and literary thrillers with no supernatural element. Oddly enough, this book anticipates the move from horror to thriller in a few different ways, and even retains a certain amount of ambiguity about the ghost story element, up to a particular point. The blurb of my copy of the book manages to drop three spoilers in the space of two sentences, and then reiterates one of the spoilers just in case I was slow on the uptake. I shall endeavor to avoid doing something similar. Though I think the Goodreads blurb is similar so I don't know why I bother.

Miles Teagarden returns to his family's old home, ostensibly to write his thesis on DH Lawrence, but more likely to keep a childhood promise. Right off the bat, things go poorly for him. A girl has been murdered and strangers are greeted with suspicion, and Miles himself didn't have the best reputation when he left. Miles exacerbates the situation by being generally clueless, clumsy, rude, and not a little bit cracked in the head. Soon he is surrounded by hostile neighbours, including his cousin Duane. His only allies are an old great-aunt and Duane's teenage daughter. Another girl goes missing, suspicion and resentment turn into violence and rage, and one or two ugly secrets from the past, as is often the case in books like these, come back to haunt the guilty and the innocent alike.

Miles is an academic, so the book is mostly written in a rather purple, prolix style, which, in fairness, Straub pulls off very well, and it does heighten Miles' sense of alienation from the farmers and shopkeepers and housewives he collides with. As a character, you do want to reach into the book and slap a bit if sense into him, but it's clear that the style also conceals just how unhinged he has become. As a murder mystery it's a compelling read; as a ghost story, it's strange and chilling spooky. He just about manages to merge the two by the end, but this isn't his strongest book by any means, which isn't to say that it isn't worth a look.