SOURCE: "All but the Clanking Chains," in Newsweek, Vol. XCIII, No. 13, March 26, 1979, p. 104.

In the following review, Prescott provides a brief plot summary and a favorable assessment of Ghost Story.

Surely this is the longest ghost story ever written. That alone should cause the aficionado to hoist an eyebrow, for the genre virtually demands brevity. I was equally troubled by the author's declaration that he wanted to push the elements of the ghost story "as far as they could go." That, I thought, had long since been accomplished by grandmasters from Hawthorne and Le Fanu to Blackwood and M. R. James. Groundless fears, these. With considerable technical skill, Peter Straub has constructed an extravagant entertainment which, though flawed, achieves in its second half some awesome effects. It is, I think, the best thing of its kind since Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House."

I mustn't be precise...