Peter Straub Books in Order

One of Straub's earliest books, Ishmael is a slim poetry collection from his Dublin years. It shows the lyrical, image-driven side of a writer who had not yet fully turned toward horror fiction.

Open Air is an early poetry collection from Straub's time in Ireland. The poems catch him in formation, testing voice, image, and mood before the novels took over.

Straub's first novel is a literary story of an American abroad, moving through marriage, infidelity, and emotional drift in Europe. It is a quieter, more realistic beginning to a career that later turned dark.

After the death of her daughter, Julia tries to start over alone in a London house. Instead she finds a presence that may belong to a murdered child, or to grief turning monstrous.

Miles Teagarden returns to Arden, Wisconsin, twenty years after a summer night that ruined several lives. The town remembers, another girl goes missing, and his past begins to feel violently alive.

Four old men in the Chowder Society are haunted by a buried sin and the death of a fifth member. When winter closes in on Milburn, their private guilt opens the door to something ravenous.

At an Arizona prep school, Tom Flanagan befriends gifted young magician Del Nightingale. Their bond leads to Del's uncle's estate in Vermont, where illusion, cruelty, and real magic become impossible to separate.

The town of Hampstead faces two horrors at once, a toxic man-made cloud and an older evil rising beneath it. Straub turns suburbia into a battleground between chemical nightmare and pure supernatural dread.

A slim standalone horror piece spun out of the imaginative territory around Floating Dragon. Straub uses domestic unease and gathering menace to make a small story feel uncomfortably large.

This poetry volume gathers work from 1970 to 1975, covering Straub's Dublin and London years. It offers a useful glimpse of the sensibility that later fed the novels.

Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer crosses America, and a parallel world called the Territories, to find the talisman that might save his mother's life. It is a huge quest story powered by grief, danger, and stubborn love.

This early literary novel follows an expatriated artist returning home, caught between adultery, ambition, and the pressures he thought he had escaped. It shows Straub before horror took center stage.

Four Vietnam veterans reunite to hunt a serial killer they think is one of their own. Their search moves from Washington to Southeast Asia and forces them back into the war they never really left behind.

Straub's first major story collection ranges from quiet dread to full nightmare. It includes key shorter works such as Blue Rose, The Juniper Tree, The Buffalo Hunter, and Mrs. God.

Scholar William Standish accepts a fellowship at an isolated English house to study a forgotten poet. The deeper he digs, the more the house, its keeper, and his own mind start closing around him.

After a near-fatal accident, Tom Pasmore becomes fascinated by detection and falls under the influence of the reclusive Lamont von Heilitz. Their search through the secrets of Mill Walk turns into a lush, dangerous coming-of-age mystery.

Tim Underhill goes home to help investigate brutal murders that seem tied to an older, hidden history. The case pulls together the Blue Rose books and turns memory itself into evidence.

Edited by Straub, this anthology gathers ghost stories from multiple writers and opens with one of his own. It is a broad tour through spectral fiction, from melancholy hauntings to nastier visitations.

Nora Chancel's unhappy marriage gets tangled with a local serial killer, an old publishing dynasty, and the mystery behind a famous cult novel. Straub mixes domestic unease, metafiction, and pursuit into one long dark chase.

On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, Ned Dunstan goes looking for the father he never knew. What he finds is a family history of doubles, hauntings, and a predator who may be closer than blood.

This seven-story collection shows Straub working in compact form with unusual freedom. Jazz, war memory, grotesque violence, and sly literary games all feed the unease.

A jazz-obsessed student tracks down an aging saxophone legend and wins a long, boozy interview. The story he hears reaches back to childhood terror and a haunting crime that refuses to stay in the past.

An adult Jack Sawyer is pulled into a series of child murders in French Landing, Wisconsin. The case leads toward a sinister house in the woods and the old worlds he has tried to forget.

Tim Underhill starts receiving messages that seem to come from the dead, while writer Willy Patrick finds her own life slipping toward nightmare. Straub turns authorship, memory, and haunting into one slippery, metafictional thriller.

Tim Underhill returns to his hometown after a family tragedy and finds a haunted house, a missing past, and the shadow of a serial killer. It is a grief-struck mystery that keeps opening into horror.

A slim Blue Rose chapbook, this little volume gathers related stories from Straub's most intricate fictional world. It is small in size but rich in the atmosphere of hidden crimes and damaged minds.

Straub's nonfiction collection gathers introductions, essays, speeches, and critical pieces from across his career. It offers a sharp look at the books, writers, and ideas that fed his fiction.

Five longer pieces, more experimental than Straub's earlier collections, move through noir, hospital unease, fairy tale, and the uncanny. It is a sharp showcase for his range in short fiction.

This grim companion to A Dark Matter follows teen Keith Hayward as cruelty, secrecy, and his sinister Uncle Till pull him toward something monstrous. Straub keeps the horror close, intimate, and very hard to shake.

This graphic adaptation retells the opening stretch of Jack Sawyer's journey through America and the Territories. It reshapes the novel's early quest into a vivid, illustrated road fantasy.

Years after a mysterious occult ritual shattered their lives, a novelist begins piecing together what really happened. The answers lead back to a vanished woman, a dead friend, and something far worse than a failed performance.

This graphic horror novel follows Fielding Bandolier, the Blue Rose killer known as Fee, as his past closes in. A detective hunting him and a ruined pub called the Green Woman pull the story toward a bloody reckoning.

This collection gathers Blue Rose-related stories that deepen Straub's world of hidden crimes, abuse, and damaged memory. It is an ideal companion for readers who want the side roads as well as the main trilogy.

An earlier, longer incarnation of A Dark Matter, this novel circles an old occult disaster and the lives it warped. Friends, secrets, and one terrible night keep pulling the past back into the present.

An older man and his much younger lover drift down a river into a feverish landscape where desire, guilt, and nightmare keep changing shape. It reads like a love story slowly rotting into horror.

Bobby Bunting is a 35-year-old outsider whose fear of women and strange fixations push him toward breakdown, revelation, or both. Straub turns one man's private obsessions into a sad, eerie plunge away from ordinary life.

An unfinished fragment, Perdido drops readers into a glittering hotel mystery full of dream logic and late-period Straub weirdness. It feels like the opening move of a larger, darker design that never fully closes.

A large selected stories volume, Interior Darkness gathers some of Straub's finest shorter work across decades. The pieces range from psychological dread to outright horror, but all carry his cool, unsettling control.

Tillman Hayward, Straub's latter-day Jack the Ripper figure, returns in a brutal late novella. It mixes serial murder, ghostly echoes, and literary unease into something cold and deeply unsettling.

Jack Sawyer returns in the planned closing volume of the Talisman saga, credited posthumously to Peter Straub. The story pushes the series back across worlds for one last, very large fight.