[In writing "Ghost Story"] Peter Straub quite clearly wishes to have it both ways: to make a hit at the checkout counter and in the English department as well. For besides nightmares, apparitions, werewolves, blood-letting viragos and hosts of the undead, Mr. Straub has summoned up the literary shades of Hawthorne, Poe and Henry James in an attempt to dignify and provide a respectable context for his long and complicated book.

Up to a point, Mr. Straub succeeds in both ways. Academic fashion these days seems to favor narrative gamesmanship and irony, and "Ghost Story" delivers plenty of both. Parts of the novel, indeed, read like a series of illustrations to scholar Wayne Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction," utilizing multiple narrators and points of view, stories within stories within stories, and more flashbacks than the Odyssey. (p. 14)

Most of the novel … is melodramatic and convincing by turns. But...