Straub, Peter. Ghost Story. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc. 1979. Print.

“A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most. A few nice phrases, a reasonably well-constructed plot.”
(50)

Sears would no be able to sleep, not after telling a story like that. By now, they all knew the effects of reliving these past events.
But it’s not just the stories, he thought; no, and it’s not just the letter either. Something is going to happen. That is why they told the stories.
(79)

Lewis, running, liked to think of the huge climax forest that had once blanketed nearly all of North America: a vast belt of trees and vegetation, silent wealth through which moved only himself and Indians. And a few spirits. Yes, in an endless vault of forest you could believe in spirits. Indian mythology was full of them - they suited the landscape. But now, in a world of Burger Kings and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and Pitch ‘n Putt golf courses, all the old tyrannical ghosts must have been crowded out.
(90)

All those trees, their number and thickness, were obscurely threatening: running away from the house was like running away from safety.
(92)

Until he reached the corner, he could feel the house across the street as a presence behind him; when he managed to get as far as the corner, his open coat flapping about the trousers to the gray suit and the dinner jacket, he suddenly saw in his mind that the house was blazing, all of it blanketed in a transparent flame that was even now warming his back. But when he turned around to look it was not burning, there were no transparent flames, nothing had happened.
(112)

Branches glistened, thorns shone like thumbtacks, implying some narrative on which he’d already closed the book.
(157)

I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R.P. Blackmur: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” The idea seemed to radiate through Hawthorne’s work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare–by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove.
(187)

For one sign of Alma’s abnormality, one indication that she was no one else I had ever known, was that she suggested a world in which advisory ghosts and men who are disguised as wolves could exist… I don not mean that she made me believe in the paraphernalia of the supernatural; but she suggested that such things might be fluttering invisibly about us.
(205)

When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey’s funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books.
(220)

Back, back to Milburn, with part of the story of Stringer Dedham riding him; back to Milburn, where people were beginning to close themselves up as the snow grew worse and the houses seemed to melt closer together; where his uncle had died and his uncle’s friends dreamed of horrors; away from the century and back to the confinement of Milburn, more and more like that of his own mind.
(261)

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Jim protested. “She’s just a broad, after all. She’s got strange habits, but she’s just a woman.”
(266)

“I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing.”
…
“Are you saying that events in town are occurrences from an unwritten book?” Sears asked incredulously. “That’s sheer poppycock.”
(275)

The Gothic attempts not only to document or play with the possibilities of the extrarational world, but actually to communicate, in fact to impose it.
- Judith Wilt