If You Could See Me Now (Peter Straub novel)
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| Author | Peter Straub |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Horror |
| Published | 1977, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan |
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If You Could See Me Now is the third published novel by American author Peter Straub and his second work of gothic or supernatural fiction. The book was published by Jonathan Cape in June 1977 – the same London publisher who published Julia in 1976. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan published an American edition also in June 1977.
A psychological novel of sexual slayings, lost love, the twisted nature of truth, and of ghosts in the real and figurative sense If You Could See Me Now tells the story of Miles Teagarden, a thirty-three-year-old recently widowed English professor from the East Coast of the United States, who in the summer of 1975 returns to the Midwestern town of Arden, Wisconsin, which was once home to his maternal grandmother, now deceased. Miles is struggling to complete his doctoral dissertation in order to keep his position at an unnamed educational institution in the East, and hopes the isolation of the Mississippi River farmland known to him in his youth might aid him in his goal.
Teagarden is a troubled man with a tragedy-haunted past, whose personal problems may or may not be of an inwardly serious nature. Throughout his adult life certain people around him have treated him with suspicion and dislike; he has frequently been the object of whispered rumors of an ill-defined nature. Immediately prior to the novel's start he has just lost his estranged wife due to drowning, and finds himself less than welcome upon his arrival in the Wisconsin town in which he intends to spend a summer writing.
Teagarden experiences what he describes as "olfactory hallucinations", which cause him to assign certain imaginary smells to people he encounters, odors such as blood, water, tooth decay, or various chemicals. He relates having experienced a supernatural event in the form of a ghostly stagecoach spilling down a dangerous stretch of roadway one night in the recent past, and acknowledges that he harbors an unquenchable obsession with his San Francisco-born cousin, Alison Greening, a year his senior. This obsession played a role in the recent failure of his marriage.
Twenty years earlier – on the night of June 21, 1955 – Miles made a vow with his cousin Alison that they would meet again at the family farm in Arden, Wisconsin on the same night in 1975. Miles' expectations of his cousin keeping this meeting make up much of the novel's first half and lead to a shocking revelation that begins the second portion of the work, which shifts radically in tone and theme, as very quickly Miles' work on his dissertation falls away and he becomes obsessed with memories of the fateful summer of 1955.
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