When the Chowder Society, or what's left of it, finally tells him the story of Eva Galli, an improbably beautiful and vexing woman they knew in their youth, and of her wretched fate, Don realizes she was a kind of shape-shifter, perhaps even our old friend the manitou. Don suspects this woman, Alma Mobley, of the worst, but can prove nothing. who leaves him to be in a relationship with Don's brother David, who ends up dead. He must tell a story, of course, to gain the old men's trust, and his past also reveals a relationship with a strange woman.

Although this aspect isn't fully developed as it could have been, Don's creative faculties play into what happens later in the novel it gets rather meta as the book comes full circle. Now I love horror fiction about horror writers! Don's novel Nightwatchers impresses the Chowder Society and is the impetus for their letter asking for aid ( I'm their Van Helsing, Don wryly notes). In distress, they write to Edward's nephew Donald Wanderley, who is, of all things, a horror writer. Ghost stories have become their means of passing time, but they find in the town around them - and in Edward's fear-stricken face in death - hints that their past, their unholy past, is catching up with them. Nightmares have become prevalent for all the men since Edward's utterly unexpected death at a party for a beautiful young actress named Ann-Veronica Moore (Edward was a celebrity ghost writer - heh). They are bound by a past more important than their present, a past some 50 years gone but that includes dead women and feral children.

In fictional Milburn, a small town in upstate New York that's soon to be under siege by a terrifying Christmas blizzard, the members of the Chowder Society meet over whiskey and cigars to keep one another company as age creeps up on them: Frederick 'Ricky' Hawthorne, Sears James, Lawrence Benedikt, John Jaffrey, and, till his death one year prior, Edward Wanderley.

Ghost story straub novel book review