One year earlier Jaffrey had thrown a party at his house in honor of a visiting actress named Ann-Veronica Moore, and their fifth member, Edward Wanderley, had died in an upstairs bedroom during the festivities. However, their group once consisted of five members. For the past 50 years these best friends have gathered together and told each other stories and have been great companions. Living in the small upstate New York town of Milburn (a fictional location which is indicated to be in Broome County east of Binghamton) are four elderly men who are members of a clique called the Chowder Society: John Jaffrey, a doctor Lewis Benedikt, a retired entrepreneur Sears James, an attorney and Ricky Hawthorne, an attorney and James' partner. Eventually, Donald and the girl arrive in Panama City, Florida, at which point the novel jumps back in time to the events of the previous winter. The novel opens with a man named Donald Wanderley traveling with a young girl whom he has apparently kidnapped. 'Salem's Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters." Synopsis And it seemed like a formal challenge." According to Straub, Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot has served as one of the inspirations for writing Ghost Story, saying: "I really wanted to expand things much more than I ever had before. I very much like the idea of stories set down in novels-a lot of my life seems to have been spent listening to older people tell me stories about their families, their youth, and all the rest. The first thing I thought of was having a bunch of old men tell stories to each other-and then I hoped I could think of some device that would link all the stories. I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of Lovecraft and a lot of the books by his 'set'-this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the field-I also read Bierce, Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot Europeans. Straub recalls that Ghost Story "started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find. It was a watershed in Straub's career, becoming a national bestseller and cementing his reputation. It was published on January 1, 1979, by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, and adapted as a 1981 horror film, minus the fifth protagonist, Lewis Benedikt. Ghost Story is a horror novel by American writer Peter Straub.
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