Complete Blue Rose Trilogy by Peter Straub: “I knew how fear tasted and how it worked.”

BooksFlashbackInterview
Written By Chris Well

Author photo by Kyle Cassidy

A look behind how these horror/mystery books impacted all the popular writer’s work.

“My childhood trauma demonstrated to me very bluntly that the world was not at all benign.”

As a little boy, horror writer Peter Straub was hit by a car and suffered serious injuries. That experience is part of what inspired his success as a horror writer.

“My childhood trauma demonstrated to me very bluntly that the world was not at all benign,” he told Monster Librarian. “And that anything could happen to anyone at any time. The fear that this recognition induced was undoubtedly very helpful to me as a horror writer. I knew how fear tasted and how it worked. You really cannot beat first-hand knowledge.”

About the author

Born in Milwaukee, Peter Straub (1943-2022) was a novelist and poet who wrote numerous popular horror and supernatural fiction novels. His books include Ghost Story, Mr. X, Floating Dragon, Shadowland, the Blue Rose trilogy, and Julia. He teamed up with Stephen King to co-write the novels The Talisman and Black House. Straub also wrote a collection of short stories, Magic Terror.

Straub received such literary honors as the International Horror Guild Award. He won the British Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. Straub passed away in 2022 at the age of 79.

What led to the Blue Rose Trilogy

After the achievement of Ghost Story—a major success as a book that also led to the movie—Straub struggled to come up with a plot that would work as successfully without being a copy. He landed on the idea of Koko’s murderous Vietnam veteran, an idea that eventually took four years to write.

Straub described Koko as being “emotionally richer” than any of his other fiction. The book also shared characters with several of his other stories.

The first book in Straub’s linked Blue Rose Trilogy, the horror/mystery novel Koko revolves around four Vietnam vets linked by a shattering secret—and their global hunt to track down a brutal killer. The book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1989.

Changing the world for his stories

Straub told Nightmare Magazine how Koko led to him realizing he could change the world around him for his stories. “My attitude toward it awakened at a very specific moment,” he said. “I’d been writing [Koko] for a long time and I’d gone a long way through. I was at the part where three of the characters go to the real Milwaukee. They stay in the Pforzheimer Hotel, which is in fact the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee.

“I’d just got to the point where [one of the characters] was looking out of the hotel window and I couldn’t remember the name of the street that runs alongside the Pfister. I realized, I can call it anything I like. I wasn’t going to be like James Joyce and get the geographical details exactly right. I wanted to be the reverse. I wanted to have total imaginative freedom over the city that these characters had just moved to.

“I’ve made up everything else. I could heighten it. I could darken it. I could stretch it out like taffy or like Play-Doh and mold it in any shape I like, which I then promptly began to do.”

Blue Rose Trilogy by Peter Straub

Koko (Blue Rose Trilogy Book 1)

Four Vietnam vets linked by a shattering secret and their global hunt to track down a brutal killer.

Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They were 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 devastating 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, searching for someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill.

 Find Koko on Amazon

Mystery (Blue Rose Trilogy Book 2)

An unlikely duo who must confront demons from the past and dark secrets that still haunt the present.

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 find the killer.

Find Mystery on Amazon

The Throat (Blue Rose Trilogy Book 3)

Secrets unearthed, demons revisited, and mysteries solved…

Tim Underhill, now an acclaimed novelist, travels back to his hometown of Millhaven, Illinois after he gets a call from John Ransom, an old army buddy. Ransom believes there’s a copycat killer on the loose, mimicking the Blue Rose murders from decades earlier—he thinks his wife could be a potential victim. 

Underhill seeks out his old friend Tom Pasmore, an aging hermit who has attained minor celebrity as an expert sleuth, to help him investigate. They quickly discover that Millhaven is a town plagued by horrifying secrets and there is a twisted killer on the loose who is far more dangerous than they ever imagined. 

Expertly tying together the events of Koko and Mystery, The Throat proves Peter Straub to be the master of the suspense novel.

Find The Throat on Amazon

Chris Well

Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.

https://chriswell.substack.com/
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