Horror novelist Peter Straub creates highly personalized fiction with an allusiveness and ambiguity that deny the genre's explicit nature. For him, the Gothic style is to be created and recreated in a changing world—Faustian pacts, buried secrets, haunted places, ghosts, vampires and succubi take on strange new shapes and effects. Stephen King describes Straub's style as "a synthesis of horror and beauty."

Drawing on interviews with Straub and featuring an exclusive interview with King, this study explores the work of the author who has been called "a writer of rare wit and intelligence in a field beset with cynical potboilers" (Douglas E. Winter, Washington Post, October 14, 1984).