Peter Straub | Peter Straub
May.19.2012
I guess I won’t be moving into that chateau on Lake Como next door to George Clooney anytime soon.
I mean, I’d sure love to have genre writer James Patterson’s money. But I doubt I’d enjoy having to keep up his fertility rate. When I think about his huge output, I hearken back to my early...
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Jan.05.2012
Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, Christmas Eve: The best damn thing I saw all year . . . even better than Breaking Bad
In my fifty-seven years, I’ve never known one without turbulence. There have always been wars and suffering, great and small; revolutions and...
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Dec.15.2011
photo: Cover of Bag of Bones, from its Wikipedia page
Some quick thoughts after having seen Stephen King's Bag of Bones (or, Stephen King's Bag of Bones) on A&E last night, while I'm presently reading it (and had read it when it first came out):
--First, let's start off by...
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Mar.14.2011
Very effectively creepy. Reminds me a lot of an Aidan Quinn/Kate Beckinsale movie, Haunted, and John Gielgud, in which everyone's a ghost, and everything's haunted, and that the beautiful mansion he saw was actually a decrepit wreck of a former mansion. Both this book and that movie have an...
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Mar.13.2011
Ghost Story
My favorite Straub. Rivals anything King has done, including The Shining, The Stand, It, etc. One of the few books, like The Shining, to actually and literally give me the chills. Great read as a mystery, as horror, as literature, as, well, as anything! A must-read for any...
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Mar.12.2011
Interesting read from the POV of a writer. Might have liked it less if I'd read it when I first encountered Straub in the 80s, solely as a reader. What I mean is, the ending isn't really in doubt, per se, in the sense that you're not worried about any of the characters. You know they'll be okay...
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Feb.19.2011
A version of this essay, with another nice photo you won't get here, is readable at my webpage A Curious Man.
I stood with notable and distinguished bookseller Bill Maxwell (not long after his silver-throated wife, Wendi, purchased my bongo drums), looking at the rambling ramparts of book-...
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Feb.04.2011
Another version of this piece can be read at my official web page, A Curious Man. There's even a picture!
Sure, it’s late for reviewing the books that blazed or drifted under my eyes in 2010 (the Precambrian Era in Internet time), especially now that everyone else is handicapping the best...
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Oct.21.2010
I have a question for all you kind visitors to my page, writers and non-writers, critics and non-critics alike: How do you read? Not what. How? I'm interested in what you have to say (You can reply here at the Red Room, or e-mail me at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net)
I ask because, I seriously...
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Apr.23.2010
If you follow me around Emeryville, I might have you arrested. But if you follow me on Twitter, (like Red Room members Peter Straub--my very first follower--and Simon Wood are doing right now) I promise I will not.
. . . on the other hand, if you're @seemynakedbod, you will be ignored; not...
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