Parenting & Family Quote by Peter Straub

A lesser writer might say an idea came to him on a plane. Straub, ever the horror novelist with a showman’s instinct, gives us “emerged from the ether” - a phrase that turns creative inspiration into an apparition. Dick Dart isn’t merely invented; he materializes, as if the author is a medium receiving a transmission. That’s the sly contract Straub offers the reader: in his world, imagination is never fully under human control, and storytelling feels less like craftsmanship than like being haunted.

The setting does quiet work. A flight is a literal in-between space: you’re suspended, removed from ordinary geography and routine, neither here nor there. “Ether” fits that liminality, echoing old radio language and spiritualist fog. It’s also a little funny - grandiose in a way Straub can get away with, because he understands how close horror sits to the absurd. The name “Dick Dart” lands with comic-book snap, suggesting speed, masculinity, maybe even pulp idiocy; it undercuts the mystical tone just enough to keep the line from drifting into self-seriousness.

Then Straub adds “my wife and children,” a domestic detail that complicates the romance of the solitary genius. The character arrives not in a monkish study but amid family logistics and vacation-bound normalcy. Subtext: the uncanny doesn’t wait for privacy. The imagination trespasses even on dad-time, and that intrusion - the supernatural invading the everyday - is basically Straub’s entire aesthetic in one sentence.