Julia

Julia is a 1975 novel by the American writer Peter Straub, published by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. It was his first novel to deal with the supernatural, and it was later adapted for film as Full Circle, released in the United States as The Haunting of Julia.

Julia Lofting leaves her husband after their daughter dies and moves into a house in London. She is grieving and alone, and the novel follows her as she becomes aware of a child in the house and begins to investigate the previous occupants. Straub keeps the haunting and Julia's own state of mind in the same frame, so the reader is never quite allowed to separate the two.

Straub wrote the book early in his career, before the novels that made his reputation in the 1980s, and it establishes his interest in grief and domestic horror. It is one of the titles that brought the ghost story back into fashion in that decade, and it is usually read as the first of his supernatural novels.