The Gathered Hayward Clan
Reviewed by Bev Vincent
The appearance of a new Peter Straub novel has always been a cause for celebration. During his 50-year career, he published only seventeen others, including two co-written with Stephen King, and there were several lengthy gaps between books. Even though Wreckage is incomplete, it represents a major addition to his oeuvre.
Who better than the author to provide the elevator pitch for the book? In a 2016 interview with Adrian Van Young of Electric Literature, Straub said:
These days and for maybe three years now I work away, when permitted by health and hospitals, on a long strange novel called Hello Jack. Jack the Ripper is invoked by a devoted admirer. The fifth-richest woman in America murders her dying husband. A black, retired homicide detective works as a private chauffeur, in which capacity he does a lot of good. Henry James pops up, thinking hard, as does the 12-year-old Aleister Crowley. There’s a weird painting, but no one can figure it out.
Straub announced his retirement from writing a month before he died in 2022. There was, according to his family — who provide an introduction to the novel — a brief discussion about letting someone else complete the book now known as Wreckage, but Straub ultimately decided he wanted it to be published as is.
Subterranean Press presents Wreckage in two volumes. The first consists of the 150,000 or so words Straub had completed. The other, What Happens in Hello Jack, is a 45,000-word “outline” written in 2013 to orient a new editor to the novel in progress. The latter volume contains a significant block of finished text, followed by long passages detailing what will happen in each section of the novel, including many nearly complete scenes. Straub occasionally steps in to explain the importance of certain incidents to the overall story he wants to tell, along with estimated page counts for these sections.
His vision of Hello, Jack (once titled The Smell of Fire according to Gary K. Wolfe, who introduces the second volume) changed over the years. Many incidents from his outline do not appear in Wreckage, though some are alluded to in the novel. Scenes featuring Henry James have been mostly converted from narrative into anecdotes recounted in the fictional volume Episodes from the Life of the Author Henry James, as Described by Various Sources. Straub’s focus in the book became more about the “present” than on the Victorian era.
Straub first wrote about the twisted Hayward family in A Dark Matter (2010), which features a disagreeable frat boy named Keith Hayward, later revealed to be a burgeoning serial killer, who suffered a ghastly fate during the agronomy meadow incident that is central to that novel. A retired police detective wrote an unpublished book in which he reveals his suspicions that Keith’s uncle, Tillman, was the serial killer known in Milwaukee as the Ladykiller. The novella A Special Place (2010), an outtake from A Dark Matter, reveals in gory detail how Uncle Tilly mentored Keith in becoming a successful murderer. Incidents from Tilly’s homicidal career — extracted from Wreckage — form the novella The Process (is a Process All its Own) (2017).
Keith Hayward is a bit player in Wreckage, which is set primarily in the late 1950s when he’s just a weird teen. The main characters are his uncle Tilly and aunt Margaret, who later rebrands herself as Margot. Their brother, Bob, is Keith’s father.
Tilly, who is married, with three daughters, works for his father-in-law in Columbus, Ohio, using his job as an excuse for regular trips to Milwaukee to investigate potential business properties. Instead, he stalks and murders women. As a Jack the Ripper acolyte, he’s profoundly disappointed that no one recognizes that he is re-enacting the Ripper’s crimes. He’s handsome, glib, and intelligent, able to entice young women to join him at his special place, where he does unspeakable things to them. However, one of his victims stands up to him instead of cowering, an episode that haunts him thereafter. An interesting aspect of Tillman Hayward is that, even though he is a serial killer, he can be terrified. Used to being in control of situations, when he encounters creepy city districts, surreal warehouses and strange hotels that seem to have been created solely for his benefit, he is shaken to the core.
One notable aspect of Straub’s writing is that even characters mentioned in passing are given grace notes and interesting observations that make them feel real. He was also intensely curious about the origins of his characters. Margaret Hayward, for example, is only mentioned in passing in earlier works, but a discussion with Wolfe led him to explore her life to the extent that she is a co-lead of Wreckage, arguably its protagonist. Margot, whose favorite writer is Henry James, is married to the “wondrous terrible” Harry Mountjoy, a much older, wealthy, and ruthless businessman. After suffering at his hands for several years, she decides to hasten his end-of-life process, enrolling her in the homicidal tradition of the Hayward family. However, this is her sole nefarious deed, and the rest of her story involves her efforts to do good things with her new status as the one of the richest women in the world.
Readers are introduced to the “weird painting,” The Gathered Clan, when Margie Hayward takes her high-school classmate, the book’s narrator Sidwell Schantz, to the basement of her home to unveil the tarp-covered painting stored there. (Straub’s daughter, Emma, attended Sidwell Friends School; one of many Easter eggs in the novel related to family, friends, places in Milwaukee where he grew up, and jazz musicians he loved.) In the opening pages, Sidwell reveals that Tillman was killed by the father of one of his victims (as recounted in A Dark Matter). He subsequently fades into the background, re-emerging every now and then to offer editorial asides. It’s never made clear how he knows so much about the Hayward family’s misadventures. Primarily, he provides readers with a first impression of the painting, which seems to absorb light rather than reflect it. Colors appear to swirl on the surface of the canvas, and he feels that it doesn’t want him to look at it.
The Gathered Clan is the only extant work of Hugo Ayling, a member of an obscure Victorian-era art movement known as “Das Beben” (The Tremor), painters who were rumored to have the ability to “generate images capable of producing profound alterations in the consciousness of the beholder — and, perhaps, in reality itself.” That quote comes from “Beyond the Veil of Vision: Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement,” a 5000-word “essay” about the movement Straub published in Conjunctions 65 (2015), which indicates how fascinated he was by these fictional artists who believed their works could unlock the doors to hidden dimensions.
Ayling was the sole survivor of the movement from the 1889 fire that destroyed part of Blane, the Haywards’ country estate in Kent, England. Blane was often visited by artists and writers — including Henry James — and was the semi-permanent home of a group of sorcerers who took Ayling under their wing. His painting depicts the manor, the family, its servants and, in a lower corner, the wizards and other “hangers-on,” including a youth who would grow up to become the occultist Aleister Crowley. A figure in a hooded cloak seems to move about the painting as if meaning to escape its confines into the world, and an ominous black door between two groups of magicians portends something sinister.
The painting, which is of dubious value, was stolen and brought to America by Margot and Tilly’s grandfather, who was subsequently murdered. After Tilly’s wife lends it to the Milwaukee Art Museum without consulting him, visitors studiously ignore it, and a museum curator is murdered. Dueling lawsuits by Tilly and Margot send it to purgatory: in storage, out of public view. Given the strange things that happen to the Haywards, one might infer that possession of the painting is a family curse.
In addition to the introduction of a strange fantasy novel that has some bearing on Tilly’s experiences, Wreckage contains another Straubian trope: an incident told from multiple viewpoints. These “Story” interludes — which call to mind The Canterbury Tales — take place in various locations and feature different people, but they all involve men who won’t stay dead and children who age supernaturally quickly into grim brutal grown-ups. Bob Hayward tells one version of the tale to his siblings, and — some 70 years earlier — Henry James hears another from an Archbishop during a dinner at Blane. James is, in fact, said to have been inspired to write many of his subsequent works by his unsettling visit to the manor and a strange incident that occurred during a later stay in Monte Carlo. (The excerpt “An Incident in Monte Carlo” appears in Conjunctions 83.)
After Margot is revealed to be the principal beneficiary of Mountjoy’s estate, her husband’s former associates pursue her, hoping to woo or bed her. She is young and beautiful as well as rich. After she officially announces her plans to divest herself from most of the businesses Mountjoy acquired — often unfairly — as well as much of their legendary art collection, she starts receiving death threats from someone who thinks she should pay for her late husband’s sins. Feeling unsafe in her lavish manor, outside of which the media gather, she moves incognito to a series of Minneapolis and St. Paul hotels, accompanied by her resourceful new personal secretary, Laura Flinders, and her husband’s chauffeur, a former homicide detective named Otto Sven Harbin.
Harbin is one of the book’s most intriguing characters. As a Black man in the 1950s, he is often unwelcome in the upscale places Margot frequents, although she uses her power and influence to shame people into admitting him. He has contented himself to remain Margot’s chauffeur despite a significant legacy from Mountjoy’s will, but the investigative skills he acquired as a police detective come in handy while protecting her.
One thing Margot and Tilly have in common, besides varying degrees of murder, is the fact that they have occasional disorienting and disturbing experiences in which they seem to travel into strange corridors, alleys and passages that may be on the other side of the ominous black door in The Gathered Clan. In the outline, Straub has Tilly traveling through the painting back to 1888, where the magicians groom him to become a modern-day Jack the Ripper. Tilly’s time-travels are absent from Wreckage (Straub also jettisoned the notion from The Process that Tilly was obsessed with scents) but the weird occult trio — or perhaps their modern-day devotees — begin to appear in the present. Margot and Harbin catch sight of them, but the wizards are particularly interested in Tilly.
Wreckage ends in the middle of a chapter exploring Laura’s background and character. She isn’t mentioned at all in the detailed outline, and isn’t rendered quite as deeply as other characters, although Straub clearly had plans to do so.
There are some inconsistencies between Wreckage and A Dark Matter. The third Hayward sibling is Bob here, whereas previously he was Bill. Tilly’s middle name changes from Brady to Haxton, which was the name of both his grandfather (who stole the painting) and great-grandfather. Laurie Terry becomes Lori Terry, and the name of the bar where Tilly is killed is different as well. Whether these changes were deliberate or if they would have been corrected upon revision is an open question.
As Sidwell says at the beginning of the novel, “strangeness leaks through every seam” of Wreckage. He claims his story “winds up in a satisfactory place for most of the people in it,” but readers will never know for sure what that ending would have been. Though the detailed outline gives a vague notion of what Straub intended in 2013, he made so many changes to the story in the ensuing years that one can only guess. Even so, Wreckage is the work of a masterful author, and fans of his work will find much to enjoy in these two volumes.
Limited: 500 numbered hardcover sets, in slipcase. Wreckage, Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2025. 448 pp. ISBN: 978-1-64524-276-5, hc. What Happens in Hello Jack, Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2025. 144 pp. ISBN: 978-1-64524-282-6, hc.
