They think he can help with the dreams and the memories that haunt them. He’s made a career out of writing horror stories. They ask the nephew of their dead friend to visit them, to help them. The ghost stories started and the frightening, unsettling dreams. His strange death signalled a change in the air. The ghost stories only started a year before when the fifth member died in mysterious circumstances at a party. They call themselves The Chowder Society. They dress in dinner jackets and silk ties. The premise seems simple enough – four old men meet in each other house once a month and tell each other ghost stories.
Large chunks of the novel move back and forth of the time and explore the pasts of the characters and the events that led them to The Chowder Society and the dreams. There are a lot of chapters set in the ‘present’ and follow a pretty linear path. The remaining 500+ pages answer those questions. Who is the man? What does he really want with the girl? The reader is unsettled by these events and wonders what the hell is going on. Sometimes they sleep in his car and he ties her to him. Straub’s tour-de-force opens with a man kidnapping a young girl and driving her across several states. Ghost Story grabs your throat in the first few pages and refuses to let go until you read the last sentence on page 567. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past – and get away with murder… For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Millburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them.
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