Tribute to Peter Straub,

by Tom Monteleone

Inquire · Offered by Gauntlet Press

Peter Straub, my friend of 30+ years has died of heart failure. I was deeply saddened by the news and thought back to the events that led to our good friendship. Many years ago, I decided to make my bones as a columnist with a very crazy entry entitled “The (Pretty) Good; The (Not-So) Bad; and The (Man-This-Is-Gonna-Get) Ugly,” which appeared in a 1987 issue of Horrorstruck . [1] The subject of the column was me naming names on HDF’s most over-rated and under-rated writers—ballsy, I know, but hey, you should have seen the letters (people used to write them back then before we had email) I got when I announced this one as “Coming Soon!” My readers were “nominating” all kinds of people for both sides of the aisle, urging me to praise or pillory a legion of various writers. Fascinating, it was. However, to reprise my selections would go, as the professors are wont to say, beyond the scope of this essay, so I can only advise to do one of three things: (a) dig out your moldy editions of Horrorstruck , (b) plink down $50 for the omnibus MAFIA collection, or (c) fuggheddabouddit. The only thing you need to know right now is that one of the writers I listed as over-rated was our very own Peter Straub. Yeah, I know . . . as I look back on that profligate time of my life known as the “pre-Elizabethan Era,” I can now see I was the consummate mook. I proved Mark Twain’s admonition concerning opening one’s mouth and removing all doubt. I was making a career of doing that. So here’s what I

• Binding: Hardcover

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