Peter Straub books

Anthologies

Best Horror of the Year Reading Order

Blue Rose Trilogy Reading Order

Criminal Records

Graphic Novels

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Talisman Reading Order

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror Reading Order

Peter Straub (1943-2022) began his career in poetry before turning to fiction, and that background shows throughout his work. Where many horror writers rely on shock, Straub preferred slow accumulation: a sense that something has gone wrong in the world, in memory, or in a person’s understanding of their own past. His early novels, including Ghost Story and Shadowland, established him as a writer who could make familiar genre premises feel genuinely strange and unsettling.

His Blue Rose trilogy, starting with Koko in 1988, showed a different side of his talent. These books operate closer to crime fiction than horror, following Vietnam veterans haunted by war and connected through a series of murders. The trilogy won multiple Bram Stoker Awards and showed that Straub’s interest was less in monsters than in the ways violence and trauma reshape ordinary lives.

Beyond his own novels, Straub was a significant figure in the horror community as an editor and anthologist. He championed other writers through projects like Poe’s Children and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series, helping define what ambitious, literary horror could look like in the twenty-first century.