Haunting tales of worldly crime and otherworldly retribution, the three novels gathered here mark the emergence of a modern master of the American gothic. “Peter Straub’s work restored the literature of horror and the uncanny to its rightful place at the heart of the American canon,” observes Michael Chabon, “simply by going about the business—with dispassionate, elegant prose and an unwavering gift for seeing into the darkest corners of the human mind—of terrifying as many readers as he possibly could.”

Julia (1975) tells the story of an American expatriate who leaves her bullying English husband after the sudden death of their nine-year-old daughter and uses her inheritance to buy a mansion in the Kensington area of London. A disturbing encounter in nearby Holland Park sets off a chain of unsettling events that compel Julia to discover the hidden history of her new home while driving her to the edge of sanity.

Skillfully fusing realism and supernatural horror, If You Could See Me Now (1977) begins in July 1955 as fourteen-year-old Alison Greening and her thirteen-year-old cousin Miles Teagarden make a vow to meet again on their grandmother’s farm in Wisconsin in twenty years’ time. Later that night they go swimming together in a nearby quarry, but only Miles emerges from the water alive. Twenty years after, when Miles comes back to rural Wisconsin to await Alison’s promised return, his arrival coincides with a series of savage murders of local teenage girls.

Inspired in part by the work of Straub’s future collaborator Stephen King, the 1979 bestseller Ghost Story is a masterwork of intricate narrative construction. In the small upstate New York town of Milburn, the four members of the Chowder Society meet to tell ghost stories in the hope of staving off the nightmares that have tormented them since the mysterious sudden death of the society’s fifth member a year earlier. When the dead man’s nephew arrives with his own ghost story, the Chowder Society begins to realize that they are under siege by malevolent forces. As winter snows isolate the town amid a spree of shocking events, the Chowder Society must face the long-buried sins of its past.

This deluxe edition includes an essay on the textual history of the three novels, a newly prepared chronology of Straub’s life and career by volume editor Emma Straub, and helpful notes.

Emma Straub is the author of six novels, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, All Adults Here, This Time Tomorrow, and American Fantasy, the story collection Other People We Married, and three picture books for children. She is the daughter of Peter Straub.