Ghost Story

Ghost Story is a horror novel by the American writer Peter Straub, published on 1 January 1979 by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. Its central character is a writer, Donald Wanderley, who arrives in the upstate New York town of Milburn after his uncle dies and finds a possible link between that death and a set of older men who trade ghost stories with one another. It was adapted into a film in 1981.

The men call themselves the Chowder Society, and they meet to tell one another ghost stories. Their shared past, and what the society has been telling itself about it, is where the trouble comes from. Wanderley's uncle was one of them, and the deaths that follow are connected to something they did together decades earlier.

The novel moves between the present and the past, and it uses the conventions of the ghost story while building a longer novel around them. Straub writes the men as a set of specific characters with their own voices, so the chapters in which each tells his story work as separate tales that assemble into one plot.

The film adaptation omitted one of the novel's five protagonists.