by Peter Straub
We were in a long, hot, crowded space. Every seat was filled, fat brown mothers and fat brown babies everywhere. Latino men in broad-brimmed hats stood at the dusty bar, a few empty-eyed young soldiers yawned and stretched, a couple of pink North Americans looked up, looked away. We are not there anymore, we have disappeared.
Before me in both space and time, Koko passes through the entrance of Goloson Airport and returns to the strong direct sunlight. He blinks; he smiles. Sunglasses? No, not yet, his departure has been too hurried for sunglasses. I remove mine, which have round black lenses the size of quarters, from my shirt pocket and hook the ends of the wire temples around my ears. In darkened tones, I can see what Koko saw—the landscape that claimed him. He walks away from the terminal easily, loosely, not looking back. He does not know that at the distance of a year and then some I am watching his confident step take him down the narrow country road. Before us is a flat foreshortened landscape, a no-place, very green and very hot. A series of low, sparsely wooded hills rises up from the plain less than a mile distant. I think of Charlie Parker leaning as if into an embrace into the conditions that surrounded him; I think of the fat old Henry James throwing open the door and rushing forward; I wish I could flood my pages with the complicated joy of these images. The long, nearly leafless branches of the jacaranda trees droop in the punishing heat. It is the forest of no-place, of no significance in itself: simply the forest that grows on the low hills, and toward which the small lean figure is moving, a step now at a time.
PETER STRAUB
Peter Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels including, most recently, A Dark Matter. Two of his novels, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In the Night Room, are winners of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in New York City.
www.peterstraub.net
Books by Peter Straub
FICTION
Marriages
Julia
If You Could See Me Now
Ghost Story
Shadowland
The General’s Wife
Floating Dragon
The Talisman (with Stephen King)
Wild Animals
Under Venus
Koko
Mystery
Houses Without Doors
A Short Guide to the City
Mrs. God
The Throat
The Hellfire Club
Mr. X
Magic Terror
Black House (with Stephen King)
Lost Boy Lost Girl
In the Night Room
5 Stories
Poe’s Children (editor)
A Dark Matter
NONFICTION
Sides
POETRY
My Life in Pictures
Ishmael
Open Air
Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970–1975
BOOKS BY PETER STRAUB
KOKO
Book One of the Blue Rose Trilogy
Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets—a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill.
Fiction/978-0-307-47220-5
MYSTERY
Book Two of the Blue Rose Trilogy
Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near-fatal accident. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn’t. Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death. When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to confront demons from the past and the dark secrets that still haunt the present.
Fiction/978-0-307-47222-9
POE’S CHILDREN
The New Horror
Peter Straub has gathered here twenty-four bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing. The collection includes stories by Dan Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, M. John Harrison, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, Jonathan Carroll, M. Rickert, Thomas Tessier, David J. Schow, Glen Hirshberg, Thomas Ligotti, Benjamin Percy, Bradford Morrow, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Ellen Klages, Tia V. Travis, Graham Joyce, Neil Gaiman, John Crowley, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson.
Fiction/978-0-307-38640-3
ANCHOR BOOKS
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