I’d dabble in horror anthologies, including one illustrated by Edward Gorey that I remember most for David H. I devoured those by the shelf row, digging through Zane Grey, Luke Short, Clifton Adams, Louis L’Amour, and many others. A viewing of For a Few Dollars More in 1967 made me a fan not only of western movies but western novels as well. I got into Sherlock Holmes, Mad Magazine, and read The Grapes of Wrath when I was maybe thirteen or so. I was nowhere near as smart as I wanted to be.īy the time I reached high school, my reading habits normalized somewhat. I recall Zhivago’s mother’s funeral as neon lights wiped the pages. When I was eleven, during a sad all-night drive from New York to Illinois and, later, Wisconsin, I tried to read Doctor Zhivago while stuffed among the luggage in the back seat. I’ve never quite stopped feeling “too little.” Everyone else said, “You’re too little,” a refrain that haunts me still. I tried to share my experience with some schoolmates, but they thought I was off my rocking horse. Yet, at the same time, I hurried to be like the grownups.Īt ten, I tried to read McKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville because my much older brothers had and were awed by its grotesque detail, violence, and salaciousness. At home, I read Dracula word by word as I dreamed of flying free through moonlit skies.

Where movies were concerned, I was one of the “Monster Kids” of that era.

I had a big pile of comic books, but my mother, with high-minded ambition, made me give them away to a sick neighbor down the road, and I never looked back. Except for Winnie the Pooh, I don’t recall reading many childhood classics of my time, outside those assigned in school, such as Charlotte’s Web. While I was a strange add-on to them, I wanted more to be like them than I did the kids in school or down Red Mill Road, in Mohegan Lake, New York.Īnd so, my reading tended toward grownup books, not the books most kids my age read during the early 1960s. Outside the family, I knew only a few kids my own age, and so I geared my little boy’s mind to the alleged grown-ups who towered and stormed around me. I was the baby in my family by nearly ten years.

Ghost story straub novel