This Time Tomorrow

Straub is the daughter of author Peter Straub. Her literary inheritance influences her own work, though she and her father write within different genres. Peter Straub was a famous writer of supernatural and horror stories. His most successful novels are Ghost Story, Julia, and The Talisman, the latter of which he cowrote with the iconic horror author Stephen King.

Ghost Story, published in 1979, became a bestseller and was adapted into a popular film, cementing Peter Straub’s reputation and fame. In This Time Tomorrow, Alice’s father, Leonard, is a science-fiction author whose success mirrors that of Peter Straub’s with Ghost Story. Twice, Peter Straub won the esteemed Bram Stoker award. At the time of his death in 2022, Peter Straub was a legendary supernatural and horror writer. Leonard’s novel, Time Brothers, is also a bestseller that is popularized through a successful and long-running television series. Thus, Straub models her character’s literary success on that of her father’s.

Straub has written about how, as her father was dying in the hospital, she took comfort in his novel The Talisman, in which a boy is afraid of his mother dying. Her fears about her own father’s mortality inform This Time Tomorrow, in which the central