The two men overcame the natural competitiveness of American writers when King gave an enthusiastic boost for the jacket of Straub’s Julia and Straub, who had “quibbles” about King’s Salem’s Lot, because of a certain “sloppiness” in style, raved over The Shining as a masterpiece, claiming King had written “probably the best supernatural novel in a hundred years.” King replied by calling Straub’s Ghost Story probably the best supernatural novel to be published in the wake of the three trail-blazers – Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Other – that ushered in the new horror wave in the Seventies.īy the time the two writers met for the first time in London, they were beginning to sound like a mutual congratulation society. It shows in his more stately cadences, what King once described as English diction – “cool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base.” Although both are bestsellers in the same horror-fantasy genre, Stephen King is a New Englander with a pop style, who frequently writes to a blaring background of rock music, whereas Peter Straub spent much of his literary life in England.
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