Ghost Story
Cataloged here as Ghost Story, this entry collects the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood, one of the most influential English horror writers of the early twentieth century and an enormous influence on H. P. Lovecraft. Blackwood specialized in stories of ordinary, often sturdy Edwardian men who venture into wilderness, mountains, or remote houses and encounter forces older and more indifferent than anything Christianity or science can name. His best known tales include The Willows, in which two friends paddling the Danube find themselves pinned in a flooded sandbar by an unseen presence, and The Wendigo, a Canadian hunting trip story that gave the legendary creature much of its modern shape. Blackwood writes with a slow, atmospheric patience, building dread through wind, water, light, and the slow erosion of his narrators' rational confidence. The collection rewards readers who like their horror philosophical, naturalistic, and quietly transcendental.
Where Ghost Story keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about Ghost Story
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Four elderly friends in a snowy New York town meet to tell each other ghost stories. Decades earlier they did something they have never spoken of. This winter, the consequence finally arrives in town.
Multiple novels share this title. The most commonly searched is Ghost Story by Peter Straub (1979), a haunted-Americana horror novel widely considered a classic. Another is Ghost Story by Jim Butcher, the 13th book in the Dresden Files.
Peter Straub and Stephen King were close friends who later co-wrote The Talisman and Black House. Ghost Story is a standalone Straub novel, though it shares the era and atmosphere of King's late 1970s and early 1980s horror.
Ghost Story is 219 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ghost Story takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Ghost Story is a standalone novel by Algernon Blackwood, not part of a series.
Ghost Story is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
