SOURCE: "Ghosts: The Many Lives of Peter Straub," in The Village Voice Literary Supplement, No. 115, May, 1993, pp. 25-26.

In the following review, Stokes examines the thematic structure of Straub's Blue Rose Trilogy.

Toward the end of Koko, the first novel of Peter Straub's Blue Rose trilogy, a killer renders himself effectively invisible by slipping into another man's clothes and appearing just where that man was expected to be. The implication is that most of the time we "see" what we anticipate seeing—and by extension, the greater the expectability of our daily lives, the less we actually perceive.

This notion is applicable to Straub's own career. When it began, in Dublin and London during the early '70s, he was clearly "literary," a well-regarded young poet and escaped academic whose first, somewhat Jamesian novel, Marriages, was treated respectfully by British critics. But with his second published novel, a...