A Ghost Story — Juried Regional Exhibition Selection

This painting is an homage to Peter Straub's Ghost Story — published in 1979, praised by Stephen King, compared by Newsweek to Shirley Jackson, and awarded the Grand Master of Horror designation at the World Horror Convention. Straub died in September 2022. His books are being re-released now because the world isn't done with him yet. At the heart of the novel is the Chowder Society: four aging men in the small fictional town of Milburn, New York, who gather every week in their finest clothes, pour their whiskey, and tell each other ghost stories. The real ghost story — the woman they killed fifty years ago and buried and believed was gone — is the one they never tell. She came back anyway. The table at the bottom of this canvas is their table. The two glasses of whiskey are poured and waiting. The four chairs are empty because the Chowder Society loses members as the haunting tightens its hold, and the absence of the men is as much the story as the ghost herself. Above the silhouetted town of Milburn, a vast spectral figure dissolves into a cobalt sky. She is not in the walls. She is the atmosphere above everything they did and refused to confess.

What Straub understood — and what drew me to this book — is that the haunting doesn't live in the house. It lives in the sky above everything you've done and never spoken. The ghost is the weather. She was always there.

Created in honor of Peter Straub (1943–2022), Grand Master of Horror.

24 × 36 inches · Oil on stretched canvas · 1-inch gallery profile · Ready to hang · Floating frame included· Certificate of authenticity · Ships from Texas