The Buffalo Hunter
Peter Straub
Cemetery Dance, Jul 2012, $19.99
ISBN: 9781587672361
Thirty-five year old Bob Bunting has not seen or spoken to his parents in three years until they call to wish him a happy birthday. They use letters to communicate as his relatives live in Battle Creek while he resides with his tall Swiss executive girlfriend Veronica in New York. In fact Veronica is fiction he created as a cross between Sigourney Weaver and a woman on a bus ad. Simply put Bob is petrified of women, but uses a made up GF to keep his parents, his co-workers and his neighbors at a light-year distance from his inner soul. Bob imbibes his coffee and cognac by sucking them from baby bottles and makes up a life of female girlfriends like Veronica who he claims attended the first two acts of Cats with him. His other escape is into novels where he becomes part of the cast.
This is an odd psychological drama of a psychic increasingly losing his tenuous grip on reality. The novella, which was part of the House Without Doors collection, is not for everybody as the protagonist is a weird phobic with crippling obsessions and grotesque fantasies that blur reality especially his use of baby bottles. Sort of having James Thurber’s Walter Mitty fantasizing about life in a psychotic nightmare, fans who relish something radically different will want to read the bizarre strange world of The Buffalo Hunter.
Harriet Klausner
Peter Straub
Cemetery Dance, Jul 2012, $19.99
ISBN: 9781587672361
Thirty-five year old Bob Bunting has not seen or spoken to his parents in three years until they call to wish him a happy birthday. They use letters to communicate as his relatives live in Battle Creek while he resides with his tall Swiss executive girlfriend Veronica in New York. In fact Veronica is fiction he created as a cross between Sigourney Weaver and a woman on a bus ad. Simply put Bob is petrified of women, but uses a made up GF to keep his parents, his co-workers and his neighbors at a light-year distance from his inner soul. Bob imbibes his coffee and cognac by sucking them from baby bottles and makes up a life of female girlfriends like Veronica who he claims attended the first two acts of Cats with him. His other escape is into novels where he becomes part of the cast.
This is an odd psychological drama of a psychic increasingly losing his tenuous grip on reality. The novella, which was part of the House Without Doors collection, is not for everybody as the protagonist is a weird phobic with crippling obsessions and grotesque fantasies that blur reality especially his use of baby bottles. Sort of having James Thurber’s Walter Mitty fantasizing about life in a psychotic nightmare, fans who relish something radically different will want to read the bizarre strange world of The Buffalo Hunter.
Harriet Klausner
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