Magic Terror

A new collection of award-winning short stories from the acclaimed master of horror – author of the bestselling MR X, KOKO, THE TALISMAN and BLACK HOUSE.Welcome to another kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven exquisite tales of living, dying and the terror that lies in between…No one tells a story like Peter Straub. He dazzles with the richness of his plots and the eloquence of his prose. He startles you into laughter in the face of events so dark that you begin to question your own moral compass. Then he reduces you to jelly by spinning a tale so terrifying – and surprising – that you have to sleep with the lights on. Now, with these seven acclaimed stories he has given us his finest and most imaginatively unsettling collection yet.‘WHEN STRAUB TURNS ON ALL HIS JETS, NO ONE IN THE SCREAM FACTORY CAN EQUAL HIM.’STEPHEN KING

Amazon.com Review

Peter Straub is a fine sorcerer of horror whose bag of tricks includes stories of pure, unadulterated horror (Julia and Koko), as well as more subtle tales of psychological suspense (Mr. X and Shadowland). Now Straub conjures up Magic Terror, a collection of seven deeply disturbing tales that display his entire range. "Bunny Is Good Bread" is without a doubt the most haunted tale of all, a harrowing account of a childhood from hell. The scary hero Fee was so traumatized as a 5-year-old by abuse from his father that he disconnects himself from the real world and lives as if in a film. Why? "If you forgot you were in a movie, your own feelings would tear you into bloody rags." Ever since the day Fee watches his mother die a horrible death, he's been tormented: "He was one-half dead himself; half of him belonged to his dead mother." Fee is not the only character to be struck by a dark epiphany, a life-changing moment. In the lyrical "Porkpie Hat," a famous jazz musician recounts the ghoulish Halloween encounter that charted the course of his destiny, and in the twisted fairy tale "Ashputtle," a fantasy-inclined "princess" seeks retribution for a traumatic incident many years before. In Straub's world, horror appears in different disguises--the dark mask of child abuse and the bloodied cloak of war ("The Ghost Village"). Regardless of how it shows itself, the effects will haunt long after lights out. --Naomi Gesinger

From Publishers Weekly

The war-numbed soldier who asks, "Just suppose...,that you were forced to confront extreme experience directly, without any mediation?" speaks for all of the spiritually traumatized souls who navigate the harrowingly rendered hells of these seven tales of suspense and horror. Straub (Mr. X) effortlessly plumbs the hearts and minds of a range of well-developed charactersAincluding a reflective assassin for hire, a five-year-old victim of domestic violence, an aging black jazz musician and a pompous Wall Street financial adviserAto locate epiphanic moments when their lives careened "out of the ordinary" and into the path of deforming private tragedy. In "Ashputtle," an implied murderess blames her crimes on an emotionally deprived childhood in which she imagines herself a modern Cinderella victimized by her cruel stepsisters. "Bunny Is Good Bread," an unnerving portrait of the psychopath as a young boy, follows young Fee Bandolier as he maladjusts to an unbearably gothic home situation in which his father has beaten his mother into a coma. "Porkpie Hat" is related as an alcoholic saxophonist's confession of a childhood brush with witchcraft, murder and miscegenation that continues to inform his blues-haunted music. In several of the talesAmost notably "The Haunted Village," which links to the novel Koko (1988) and stories from his previous collection, Houses Without Doors (1990)AStraub skillfully evokes the supernatural to suggest the dislocating effect of intense psychological upset. Mixing stark realism with black comedy, and reverberating with echoes of Conrad, Melville and the Brothers Grimm, these excursions to the dark side of life set a high standard for the literature of contemporary magic terror. (July) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Straub is not called a master of horror for nothing. In this collection of seven tales, ranging from the story of a grade school teacher with an evil secret to a Vietnam War grunt whose reality is "melting at the edges," Straub shows that horror comes in numerous forms--many of which are not so much frightening as deeply disturbing. The true power of the stories here will not really affect readers until several hours after they have finished reading the tales, which can inspire a multitude of reactions. The final story in the collection, "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," demonstrates Straub's familiarity with Victorian-era literature and his ability to stand a writing style on its ear. Sex and violence go hand-in-hand with horror of this kind so this collection is not for the faint-of-heart. Highly recommended for all horror collections.-Alicia Graybill, Lincoln City Libs., NE Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

Welcome to another kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven exquisite tales of living, dying, and the terror that lies in between. . . .AshputtleIsn?t It Romantic??CHILLING.??SKILLFULLY CONSTRUCTED.??The New York Times?Kirkus Reviews (starred review)The Ghost VillageBunny Is Good BreadWinner of a World Fantasy Award?TERRIFYING.??VERY, VERY SCARY.??The Washington Post Book World?The Philadelphia InquirerPorkpie HatHunger, An Introduction?DARK TWISTS AND?BRILLIANTLY SUBVERSIVE.?DARKER HUMOR.??Locus?USA TodayMr. Clubb and Mr. CuffWinner of a Bram Stoker Award?[A] TOUR-DE-FORCE . . . [THAT] WILL HAUNT READERS LONG AFTER THEY?VE CLOSED THE COVERS.??The Denver Post?PETER STRAUB IS AN EXCELLENT WRITER. . . .HE MAKES US FEEL THE TERROR.??The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Back Cover

"Welcome to another kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven exquisite tales of living, dying, and the terror that lies in between. . . . "AshputtleIsn't It Romantic?"CHILLING.""SKILLFULLY CONSTRUCTED.""-The New York Times-Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "The Ghost VillageBunny Is Good BreadWinner of a World Fantasy Award"TERRIFYING.""VERY, VERY SCARY."-"The Washington Post Book "World-"The Philadelphia Inquirer Porkpie HatHunger, An Introduction"DARK TWISTS AND"BRILLIANTLY SUBVERSIVE."DARKER HUMOR."-"Locus"-USA Today "Mr. Clubb and Mr. CuffWinner of a Bram Stoker Award"[A] TOUR-DE-FORCE . . . [THAT] WILL HAUNT READERS LONG AFTER THEY'VE CLOSED THE COVERS.""-The Denver Post "PETER STRAUB IS AN EXCELLENT WRITER. . . .HE MAKES US FEEL THE TERROR."-"The Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

AshputtlePeople think that teaching little children has something to do with helping other people, something to do with service. People think that if you teach little children, you must love them. People get what they need from thoughts like this.People think that if you happen to be very fat and are a person who acts happy and cheerful all the time, you are probably pretending to be that way in order to make them forget how fat you are, or cause them to forgive you for being so fat. They make this assumption, thinking you are so stupid that you imagine that you're getting away with this charade. From this assumption, they get confidence in the superiority of their intelligence over yours, and they get to pity you, too.Those figments, those stepsisters, came to me and said, Don't you know that we want to help you? They came to me and said, Can you tell us what your life is like?These moronic questions they asked over and over: Are you all right? Is anything happening to you? Can you talk to us now, darling? Can you tell us about your life?I stared straight ahead, not looking at their pretty hair or pretty eyes or pretty mouths. I looked over their shoulders at the pattern on the wallpaper and tried not to blink until they stood up and went away.What my life was like? What was happening to me?Nothing was happening to me. I was all right.They smiled briefly, like a twitch in their eyes and mouths, before they stood up and left me alone. I sat still on my chair and looked at the wallpaper while they talked to Zena.The wallpaper was yellow, with white lines going up and down through it. The lines never touched--just when they were about to run into each other, they broke, and the fat thick yellow kept them apart.I liked seeing the white lines hanging in the fat yellow, each one separate.When the figments called me darling, ice and snow stormed into my mouth and went pushing down my throat into my stomach, freezing everything. They didn't know I was nothing, that I would never be like them, they didn't know that the only part of me that was not nothing was a small hard stone right at the center of me.That stone has a name. MOTHER.If you are a female kindergarten teacher in her fifties who happens to be very fat, people imagine that you must be truly dedicated to their children, because you cannot possibly have any sort of private life. If they are the parents of the children in your kindergarten class, they are almost grateful that you are so grotesque, because it means that you must really care about their children. After all, even though you couldn't possibly get any other sort of job, you can't be in it for the money, can you? Because what do people know about your salary? They know that garbage men make more money than kindergarten teachers. So at least you didn't decide to take care of their delightful, wonderful, lovable little children just because you thought you'd get rich, no no.Therefore, even though they disbelieve all your smiles, all your pretty ways, even though they really do think of you with a mixture of pity and contempt, a little gratitude gets in there.Sometimes when I meet with one of these parents, say a fluffy-haired young lawyer, say named Arnold Zoeller, Arnold and his wife, Kathi, Kathi with an i, mind you, sometimes when I sit behind my desk and watch these two slim handsome people struggle to keep the pity and contempt out of their well-cared-for faces, I catch that gratitude heating up behind their eyes.Arnold and Kathi believe that a pathetic old lumpo like me must love their lovely little girl, a girl say named Tori, Tori with an i (for Victoria). And I think I do rather love little Tori Zoeller, yes I do think I love that little girl. My mother would have loved her, too. And that's the God's truth.I can see myself in the world, in the middle of the world.I see that I am the same as all nature.In our minds exists an awareness of perfection, but nothing on earth, nothing in all of nature, is perfectly conceived. Every response comes straight out of the person who is responding.I have no responsibility to stimulate or satisfy your needs. All that was taken care of a long time ago. Even if you happen to be some kind of supposedly exalted person, like a lawyer. Even if your name is Arnold Zoeller, for example.Once, briefly, there existed a golden time. In my mind existed an awareness of perfection, and all of nature echoed and repeated the awareness of perfection in my mind. My parents lived, and with them, I too was alive in the golden time. Our name was Asch, and in fact I am known now as Mrs. Asch, the Mrs. being entirely honorific, no husband having ever been in evidence, nor ever likely to be. (To some sixth-graders, those whom I did not beguile and enchant as kindergartners, those before whose parents I did not squeeze myself into my desk chair and pronounce their dull, their dreary treasures delightful, wonderful, lovable, above all intelligent, I am known as Mrs. Fat-Asch. Of this I pretend to be ignorant.) Mr. and Mrs. Asch did dwell together in the golden time, and both mightily did love their girl-child. And then, whoops, the girl-child's Mommy upped and died. The girl-child's Daddy buried her in the estate's church yard, with the minister and everything, in the coffin and everything, with hymns and talking and crying and the animals standing around, and Zena, I remember, Zena was already there, even then. So that was how things were, right from the start.The figments came because of what I did later. They came from a long way away--the city, I think. We never saw city dresses like that, out where we lived. We never saw city hair like that, either. And one of those ladies had a veil!One winter morning during my first year teaching kindergarten here, I got into my car--I shoved myself into my car, I should explain; this is different for me than for you, I rammed myself between the seat and the steering wheel, and I drove forty miles east, through three different suburbs, until I got to the city, and thereupon I drove through the city to the slummiest section, where dirty people sit in their cars and drink right in the middle of the day. I went to the department store nobody goes to unless they're on welfare and have five or six kids all with different last names. I just parked on the street and sailed in the door. People like that, they never hurt people like me.Down in the basement was where they sold the wallpaper, so I huffed and puffed down the stairs, smiling cute as a button whenever anybody stopped to look at me, and shoved myself through the aisles until I got to the back wall, where the samples stood in big books like the fairy-tale book we used to have. I grabbed about four of those books off the wall and heaved them over onto a table there in that section and perched myself on a little tiny chair and started flipping the pages.A scared-looking black kid in a cheap suit mumbled something about helping me, so I gave him my happiest, most pathetic smile and said, well, I was here to get wallpaper, wasn't I? What color did I want, did I know? Well, I was thinking about yellow, I said. Uh-huh, he says, what kinda yellow you got in mind? Yellow with white lines in it. Uh-huh, says he, and starts helping me look through those books with all those samples in them. They have about the ugliest wallpaper in the world in this place, wallpaper like sores on the wall, wallpaper that looks like it got rained on before you get it home. Even the black kid knows this crap is ugly, but he's trying his damnedest not to show it.I bestow smiles everywhere. I'm smiling like a queen riding through her kingdom in a carriage, like a little girl who just got a gold and silver dress from a turtledove up in a magic tree. I'm smiling as if Arnold Zoeller himself and of course his lovely wife are looking across my desk at me while I drown, suffocate, stifle, bury their lovely, intelligent little Tori in golden words.I think we got some more yellow in this book here, he says, and fetches down another big fairy-tale book and plunks it between us on the table. His dirty-looking hands turn those big stiff pages. And just as I thought, just as I knew would happen, could happen, would probably happen, but only here in this filthy corner of a filthy department store, this ignorant but helpful lad opens the book to my mother's wallpaper pattern.I see that fat yellow and those white lines that never touch anything, and I can't help myself, sweat breaks out all over my body, and I groan so horribly that the kid actually backs away from me, lucky for him, because in the next second I'm bending over and throwing up interesting-looking reddish goo all over the floor of the wallpaper department. Oh God, the kid says, oh lady. I groan, and all the rest of the goo comes jumping out of me and splatters down on the carpet. Some older black guy in a clip-on bow tie rushes up toward us but stops short with his mouth hanging open as soon as he sees the mess on the floor. I take my hankie out of my bag and wipe off my mouth. I try to smile at the kid, but my eyes are too blurry. No, I say, I'm fine, I want to buy this wallpaper for my kitchen, this one right here. I turn over the page to see the name of my mother's wallpaper--Zena's wallpaper, too--and discover that this kind of wallpaper is called "The Thinking Reed."You don't have to be religious to have inspirations.An adventurous state of mind is like a great dwelling place.To be lived truly, life must be apprehended with an adventurous state of mind.But no one on earth can explain the lure of adventure.Zena's example gave me two tricks that work in my classroom, and the reason they work is that they are not actually tricks!The first of these comes into play when a particular child is disobedient or inattentive, which, as you can imagine, often occurs in a room full of kindergarten-age children. I deal with these infractions in this fashion. I command the child to come to my desk. (Sometimes, I command two children to come to my desk.) I stare at the child until it begins to squirm. Sometimes it blushes or trembles. I await the physical signs of shame or discomfort. Then I pronounce the child's name. "Tori," I say, if the child is Tori. Its little eyes invariably fasten upon mine at this instant. "Tori," I say, "you know that what you did is wrong, don't you?" Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the child nods its head. "And you will never do that wrong thing again, will you?" Most often the child can speak to say No. "Well, you'd better not," I say, and then I lean forward until the little child can see nothing except my enormous, inflamed face. Then in a guttural, lethal, rumble-whisper, I utter, "OR ELSE." When I say "OR ELSE," I am very emphatic. I am so very emphatic that I feel my eyes change shape. I am thinking of Zena and the time she told me that weeping on my mother's grave wouldn't make a glorious wonderful tree grow there, it would just drown my mother in mud.The attractiveness of teaching is that it is adventurous, as adventurous as life.My mother did not drown in mud. She died some other way. She fell down in the middle of the downstairs parlor, the parlor where Zena sat on her visits. Zena was just another lady then, and on her visits, her "social calls," she sat on the best antique chair and held her hands in her lap like the most modest, innocent little lady ever born. She was half Chinese, Zena, and I knew she was just like bright sharp metal inside of her, metal that could slice you but good. Zena was very adventurous, but not as adventurous as me. Zena never got out of that town. Of course, all that happened to Zena was that she got old, and everybody left her all alone because she wasn't pretty anymore, she was just an old yellow widow-lady, and then I heard that she died pulling up weeds in her garden. I heard this from two different people. You could say that Zena got drowned in mud, which proves that everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time.The other trick I learned from Zena that is not a trick is how to handle a whole class that has decided to act up. These children come from parents who, thinking they know everything, in fact know less than nothing. These children will never see a classical manner demonstrated at home. You must respond in a way that demonstrates your awareness of perfection. You must respond in a way that will bring this awareness to the unruly children, so that they too will possess it.It can begin in a thousand different ways. Say I am in conference with a single student--say I am delivering the great OR ELSE. Say that my attention has wandered off for a moment, and that I am contemplating the myriad things I contemplate when my attention is wandering free. My mother's grave, watered by my tears. The women with city hair who desired to give me help, but could not, so left to be replaced by others, who in turn were replaced by yet others. How it felt to stand naked and besmeared with my own feces in the front yard, moveless as a statue, the same as all nature, classical. The gradual disappearance of my father, like that of a figure in a cartoon who grows increasingly transparent until total transparency is reached. Zena facedown in her garden, snuffling dirt up into her nostrils. The resemblance of the city women to certain wicked stepsisters in old tales. Also their resemblance to handsome princes in the same tales.

From AudioFile

Actor Ron McLarty presents Straub's horrific tales in a straightforward, almost nonchalant, manner. He drops his voice and slows the pace of his reading to good effect in reading tales about the results of child abuse and wife beating, as well as ghoulish Halloween encounters. Whether listeners find the tales perverted or fascinating, Mclarty's deadpan style adds drama and reality to short stories about ghosts in Vietnam ("The Ghost Village"), jazz musicians ("Porkpie Hat"), and a Cinderella-type tale ("Ashputtle"). The occasional unexpected humor, or black comedy, especially in "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," takes listeners, but not Mclarty, by surprise. Enjoy this trip into the bizarre and the unknown. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About the Author

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Peter Straub is the author of fifteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He has won the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker awards, and two World Fantasy awards. He lives in New York City.

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