Mrs. God

A tale of an inspired literary sojourn that turns into something far more sinister.Esswood House. Home and estate of the Seneschal family, aristocratic patrons of the literary arts for well over a hundred years. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Henry James were privileged to call themselves guests and Esswood Fellows. Even minor poets such as Isobel Standish found in Esswood a respite from the outer world and its refined atmosphere an inspiration for her work. There was always talk of a hidden secret in Esswood’s past, and the Seneschal children were often so pale and sickly, but don’t all English manor houses have a few ghost stories to call their own?When Professor William Standish receives the rare honor of an Esswood Fellowship, and the chance to study Isobel’s private manuscripts at close hand, he is thrilled beyond his wildest ambitions. But something seems slightly off at Esswood House. He hears faint laughter in the halls, the pitter-pattering of small feet in the night; strange faces appear in the windows of the library, and there are those giant dollhouses in the basement . . .Never before published as a separate volume, Mrs. God is a very different kind of ghost story from one of America’s most celebrated authors.

From Booklist

William Standish gets what he hopes is his entrée to the prestige track in modern-lit studies when he is invited to Esswood, an English country house once frequented by the gods of high modernism—and his grandfather’s first wife. There he intends to complete his work on Isobel Standish’s poetry, more of which resides in manuscript in Esswood’s archives. In effect fleeing his pregnant wife, whose first child he insisted be aborted, he encounters little but strangeness on the road and upon arrival at Esswood. Despite the beauty of the place, things just become stranger for Standish, who ultimately melts down, thanks to malignity in the house as well as his tortured psyche. Appearing first in Houses without Doors (1990), then, lengthened, in a limited edition, Straub’s novella emerges once more in a general trade printing. Not as polished, though fully as intricate, as Straub’s recent work, in the right hands it could, however, become a haunted-house movie more shockingly eldritch than the 1961 Turn of the Screw adaptation, The Innocents, not to mention Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. --Ray Olson

About the Author

Peter Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of seventeen novels. His two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House, were international bestsellers. In 2006, he was given the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Peter and his wife live in New York City.

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