MAGIC TERROR - Softcover

Straub, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007109911 ISBN 13: 9780007109913

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2011

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review:

‘Elegant, terrifying, provocative... the best collection of suspense and horror fiction in many years. Magic Terror is bliss for readers whose love of the eerie doesn’t preclude a taste for literary elegance.’
Washington Post

‘Clever exercises in horror.’
New York Times

‘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.’
Publishers Weekly

‘Peter Straub is the great classicist of horror fiction... a world-class author.’
CLIVE BARKER

From the Back Cover:

No one tells a story like Peter Straub. He dazzles with the complexity of his plots and the eloquence of his prose. He startles you into laughter in the face of events so dark you begin to question your own moral compass. Then he reduces you to jelly by spinning a tale so terrifying – and surprising – you wind up sleeping with the lights on. With Magic Terror, his first collection since the acclaimed Houses Without Doors, he has given us one of the most imaginatively unsettling collections in years.

The terrain of these extraordinary stories is marked by brutality, heartbreak, despair, wonder and an unexpected humour. ‘Bunny Is Good Bread’ takes us into the mind of a small boy trapped in grotesque circumstances to portray the creation of a serial killer. ‘Hunger, an Introduction’, narrated by the ghost of a pompous, self-pitying murderer, evokes a profoundly beautiful vision of earthly life, one appreciated far more by the dead than the living. While the award-winning novella ‘Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff’, a masterpiece of black comedy, is a revenge tale in which torture is a moral art and the revenger undergoes a transforming, albeit painful, education.
In the words of Mrs Asch, the narrator of ‘Ashputtle’, ‘the main feature of adventure is that it goes forward into unknown country.’ Straub’s devotees will be entranced by what their fearless guide has in store for them. Those as yet uninitiated are in for a harrowing literary journey.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0007109911
• ISBN 13: 9780007109913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416