Julia - by Peter Straub (Paperback)

About the Book

"In a house in London a woman starts a new life, trying to put tragedy behind her. Then a pretty blonde child runs into view, bringing with her an inexplicable suggestion of evil. Once Julia Lofting had a husband and a daughter. But everything has changed since she bolted from her marriage, in flight from the unbearable truth of her daughter's death. For Julia, there is no escape. Another child awaits, another mother suffers, and a circle of the damned gathers around her. The haunting has begun"--

Book Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story--and the master of American horror--tells the terrifying story of a woman who, in her desperation to flee the past, encounters an inexplicable aura of evil.

Julia's first purchase upon leaving her husband is a large, old-fashioned house in Kensington, where she plans to live by herself, well away from her soon-to-be-ex and the home where their young daughter died. She feels a peculiar affinity for the house right away, a feeling that deepens with each glimpse of a mysterious little girl--blond, like her daughter--in the neighborhood, and even in her dreams

But the little girl and the big house have an inexplicable aura of evil. And Julia quickly discovers that escaping her past is not as simple as turning a key.

Review Quotes

"Peter Straub is a national treasure." --Lawrence Block

"An extraordinarily gripping and tantalizing read." --New Statesman

"A crazy-quilt of horror." --Milwaukee Journal

"Genuinely frightening." --Chicago Tribune

"I haven't read anything that so terrifyingly evoked the presence of evil and supernatural threat since The Exorcist. Julia may be better." --The Buffalo News

"Haunting, in every sense of the word." --Robert Bloch, author of Psycho

"You expect the horrifying in the fiction of Peter Straub . . . and you get it." --The New York Times

"[Straub] is a master at blurring the supernatural, the real-world-scary, and the monsters in your psyche." --The Plain Dealer

"Not since Edgar Allan Poe has an author taken such liberties with his readers' nerves." --Cosmopolitan

"Straub is the master of subtle, smoldering dread." --People

"Straub well understands the dark recesses of the psyche where the personal demons dwell." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Peter Straub is a fine storyteller." --The Washington Post

"When Peter Straub turns on all his jets, no one in the scream factory can equal him." --Stephen King

About the Author

PETER STRAUB is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels. In the Night Room and Lost Boy, Lost Girl are winners of the Bram Stoker Award, as is his collection 5 Stories. Straub is the editor of numerous anthologies, including the two-volume American Fantastic Tale from the Library of America. He died in 2022.