Peter Straub, whose literary novels of terror, mystery and the supernatural placed him in the top ranks of the horror-fiction boom of the 1970s and ‘80s, died September 4 in Manhattan. He was 79.

Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it, the New York Times said. 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.

Nevertheless, he won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that previously had been sidelined as sub-literary, The Times said.

“I wanted to take the genre and pull it upstairs a little bit,” he told The Times in 1979. “Not exactly transcend the genre, but make a little more of the material than has been made of it in the recent past.

Of the horror label, he told Publishers Weekly in 2016, “I like its acknowledgment that life is a dodgy and uncertain business, and a monster with a smiling face may live or work right next door to you.”