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It’s winter in Minnesota and I am keenly missing my bragging rights to living in the nastiest, coldest place in the lower forty-eight. Embarrass, Minnesota is frankly an embarrassment and today, for the love of all that’s holy, it rained. So, in order to put me into the proper winter mood, I cracked open the second scariest book I’ve ever read… Peter Straub’s GHOST STORY.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...”

So begins GHOST STORY, set in a small, snowed-in town in upstate New York. GHOST STORY is permeated by foreboding, uneasy glimpses of the supernatural, secret knowledge of hidden vices, and the inexplicable sense that one can never out-live the sins of one’s youth.

Four old men huddle together as a storm isolates them from the rest of the world. With the storm comes a specter of their collective pasts, a gorgeous, fascinating woman named Eva in whose accidental death fifty years before, Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Edward Wanderly, Lewis Benedikt and John Jaffrey all had a hand. They all hand, too, in conspiring to cover up her death by pushing her and her car into a nearby lake. But as it sank her face appeared in the rear window, leaving the then young men to realize that they haven’t covered up an accidental death, they’d murdered a woman.

Fifty years later, these men are haunted by the visitation of another gorgeous and evil entity and send for Ed’s nephew, Don , a writer whose claim to fame is a horror story they soon discover is based on Don’s own experience with the dead woman. Together, cut off from the world, they try to exorcise the demons hunting them from both within and without.

GHOST STORY is simply a classic of the genre. Every page unfolds with creepy urgency, a terrifying feeling of inevitability that sweeps the reader along to the very last page.

And it really makes you feel the cold, too.