Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pork Pie Hat | 2000 | Peter Straub | Buy |
Pork Pie Hat began as a standalone novella before appearing in the Criminal Records anthology. The story is narrated by a young jazz enthusiast who becomes close with an elderly saxophonist known as Hat, one of the great musicians of the bebop era. Over time, Hat begins to share a story he has kept secret for most of his life: a night in his Mississippi childhood when something terrible happened, something connected to race, violence, and a pair of figures who may not have been entirely human.
The story works as crime fiction and as a ghost story, and it works as a meditation on jazz, on the South, and on the way certain memories become so heavy they define a person’s entire existence. Straub’s handling of Hat’s voice is particularly careful, giving the old musician a dignity and complexity that make the horror of his story land harder than it would in a more straightforward supernatural tale.
Pork Pie Hat has been published separately and collected in several of Straub’s own short fiction volumes, so readers who have already encountered it in those formats will find it here in its original anthology context.