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A Magellan of the Interior
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18640 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1991 |
5,865 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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HOUSES WITHOUT DOORS
Peter Straub
New York: Dutton, 1990
368 pp., $19.95
Each of the characters in Peter Straub's collection of short stories, Houses without Doors, flees by a back exit from some kind of intolerable private reality. In their journey into madness, some find themselves trapped, wedged into an ever-narrowing circle of diminishing options and opportunities; and others are transfigured and disappear into an ever-widening sphere of glory. For all of them, however, there can be no return. Their lives have become--to borrow the lines form Emily Dickinson--
...The house without the door--
"Tis entered from the sun--
And then the ladder's thrown away,
Because escape--is done--
Straub has waited a long time to produce this, his first collection of stories. A successful novelist since 1973, with the popular novels Julia, Ghost Story, Shadowland, and Mystery behind him--all noted for their vast, sprawling organizational schemes and cumulative sense of horror--he now turns to a form demanding a greater compression and concision. The results are admirable. He has produced his most important book, a compelling--albeit disturbing--read.
At first glance these thirteen short stories (six tales interspersed with seven brief "interludes," as they are called) seem a random sampling of contemporary horrors--atrocities in Vietnam ("Blue Rose"), the sexual abuse of children ("The Juniper Tree"), a serial killer ("A Short Guide to the City"), abortion ("Mrs. God"), and an assortment of quirky obsessions--like the man who literally buries himself in a room filled with baby bottles ("The Buffalo Hunter") and the business executive who one day goes quietly mad and takes a magical taxi into another world ("Something abut a Death, Something about a Fire").
However, to pursue Straub's own metaphor, the partitions between these stores, characters, and incidents are paper thin--as if these "houses without doors" are also, in effect, houses without walls. For example, the murderer in "Blue Rose," Harry Beevers, reappears
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