![]() Some of my favorites in this volume include August Derleth's "The Lonesome Place," Sherwood Anderson's "A Death in the Woods," Stephen Millhauser's "In the Penny Arcade" and Nancy Etchemendy's "Cat in Glass." Rather Oates has gone out of her way to include distinguished work from high brow and low brow, renowned and largely overlooked authors. Unlike some anthologies, this one isn't just a random hodgepodge of some gems and a bunch of mediocre tales. Surveying the entire history of American gothic literature, Oates presents an astonishing array of authors and viewpoints, from straight up horror to more existential/psychological gothic. But Oates moves beyond the usual syllabus to include Lovecraft (she should get some credit for helping to mainstream him) and contemporary writers like King and Thomas Ligotti, an author I think deserves more critical attention. ![]() Some of the authors are the usual suspects that crop up in high school anthologies (A Rose for Emily, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Black Cat). Oates is no stranger to the gothic genre herself and she has created one hell of an anthology here. (from Geek Love) The nuclear family: his talk, her teeth / Katherine Dunn. Ursus Triad, later / Kathe Koja and Barry N. The girl who loved animals / Bruce McAllister. The last feast of Harlequin / Thomas Ligotti. ![]() In the penny arcade / Steven Millhauser. The anatomy of desire / John L'Heureux -įreniere (from Interview with the Vampires) / Anne Rice -Ī short guide to the city / Peter Straub. Human moments in World War III / Don DeLillo. Shattered like a glass goblin / Harlan Ellison. Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams / Sylvia Plath. In the icebound hothouse / William Goyen. The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer. The striding place / Gertrude Atherton -ĭeath in the woods / Sherwood Anderson. The romance of certain old clothes / Henry James. The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Tartarus of maids / Herman Melville. Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne. The man of adamant / Nathaniel Hawthorne. The legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving. Rom Wieland, or The transformation / Charles Brockden Brown. With Joyce Carol Oates’s superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn’t create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer’s subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. In showing us the gothic vision-a world askew where mankind’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless-Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Herman Melville’s horrific tale of factory women, “The Tartarus of Maids,” and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time.Īdded to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers. ![]() She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the “gothic” in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. ![]()
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