Magic Terror - Softcover

‘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

‘Straub effortlessly plumbs the hearts and minds of a range of well-developed characters. 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

A new collection of short stories from the acclaimed author of the bestselling Mr X and The Talisman.

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.