Whipped Cream Difficulties

Peter Straub, noted writer.

Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like “Julia” (1975) and “Ghost Story” (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.
Not that he could complain about what critics and readers thought. Starting with “Julia,” his third novel, about a woman who is haunted by a spirit that may or may not be her dead daughter, Mr. Straub won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that had previously been sidelined as sub-literary.
“He was a unique writer in a lot of ways,” Mr. King said in a phone interview on Monday. “He was not only a literary writer with a poetic sensibility, but he was readable. And that was a fantastic thing. He was a modern writer, who was the equal of say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things.”

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Though he was hardly as prolific as Mr. King, Mr. Straub continued to write best-selling books, not all of which involved horror. His “Blue Rose” trilogy — “Koko” (1988), “Mystery” (1990) and “The Throat” (1993) — revolve around the hunt for a serial killer. Though there is nothing supernatural about them, each book won a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, three of seven Stoker prizes that Mr. Straub accumulated.

Dr. Ronald Glasser. He was another one of those folks I had not heard of before, but he wrote a highly acclaimed book, 365 Days.

Dr. Glasser was opposed to the war when he was drafted in August 1968.
He was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan — one of four frenetic Army hospitals in Japan that every month were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 injured troops airlifted from the battlefields of Vietnam during their 365-day tours of duty.
Dr. Glasser was originally assigned as a pediatrician to treat the families of military dependents in Japan. But, he wrote, “I soon realized that the troopers they were pulling off those medevac choppers were only children themselves.”
“365 Days,” published in 1971, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The playwright David Mamet hailed it in The Wall Street Journal as “the best book to come out of Vietnam, and yet the author wasn’t stationed there.”
Dr. Glasser explained in “365 Days” that he had never intended to become a writer, but that he felt compelled to record what he had seen and heard at the hospital. He dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, the author of the novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” which vividly described the bloody battlegrounds of the Civil War.
“I did not start writing for months, and even then it was only to tell what I was seeing and being told, maybe to give something to these kids that was all theirs without doctrine or polemics, something that they could use to explain what they might not be able to explain themselves,” Dr. Glasser wrote.
“As for me,” he continued, “my wish is not that I had never been in the Army, but that this book could never have been written.”

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Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was a national security adviser in the Trump administration and is now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, characterized Dr. Glasser in an email as “one of the most humane men I have ever met” and said that what distinguished him was “his description of war and the experiences of those who fight, sacrifice and suffer” and “his empathy for those he treated and to whom he listened” — including his fellow doctors and nurses.

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The book was banned from some public libraries because it liberally quoted the soldiers’ use of profanity. Dr. Glasser was unapologetic.
“The truth as I saw it was that common language failed,” he testified in a court case contesting the ban. “It didn’t express their anguish. It wasn’t enough.”