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American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Edited by Peter Straub

“A stupendous, spellbinding reading experience waiting to be had.”—Jonathan Lethem
“A valuable collection of excellent, often deeply disturbing stories.”— Kirkus Reviews

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Interviews The Other American Gothic: Director Cody Knotts on Adapting Charles Brockden Brown’s Macabre Masterpiece for Film
June 13, 2023

Story of the Week Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Luella Miller”
May 22, 2020

Story of the Week John Kendrick Bangs, “Thurlow’s Christmas Story”
December 21, 2017

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From early on, American literature has teemed with tales of horror, of hauntings, of terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted by the unknown and the irrational. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new themes as it explores the bad dreams that lurk around the edges—if not in the unacknowledged heart—of the everyday. Peter Straub, one of today’s masters of horror and fantasy, offers an authoritative and diverse gathering of stories calculated to unsettle and delight.

This first volume surveys a century and a half of American fantastic storytelling, revealing in its 44 stories an array of recurring themes: trance states, sleepwalking, mesmerism, obsession, possession, madness, exotic curses, evil atmospheres. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with the forces of darkness. In the ghost-haunted Victorian and Edwardian eras, writers including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce explore ever more refined varieties of spectral invasion and disintegrating selfhood.

In the twentieth century, with the arrival of the era of the pulps, the fantastic took on more monstrous and horrific forms at the hands of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and other classic contributors to Weird Tales. Here are works by acknowledged masters such as Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Conrad Aiken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with surprising discoveries like Ralph Adams Cram’s “The Dead Valley,” Emma Francis Dawson’s “An Itinerant House,” and Julian Hawthorne’s “Absolute Evil.”

American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms.

Peter Straub, editor, is the author of 18 novels, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. He edited H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, volume #155 of The Library of America series.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews The Other American Gothic: Director Cody Knotts on Adapting Charles Brockden Brown’s Macabre Masterpiece for Film
June 13, 2023

Story of the Week Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Luella Miller”
May 22, 2020

Story of the Week John Kendrick Bangs, “Thurlow’s Christmas Story”
December 21, 2017

Story of the Week Frank Norris, “Grettir at Thorhall-stead”
October 30, 2017

Story of the Week Edward Lucas White, “Lukundoo”
May 12, 2017
Table of Contents

Charles Brockden Brown | Somnambulism: A Fragment
Washington Irving | The Adventure of the German Student
Edgar Allan Poe | Berenice
Nathaniel Hawthorne | Young Goodman Brown
Herman Melville | The Tartarus of Maids
Fitz-James O’Brien | What Was It?
Bret Harte | The Legend of Monte del Diablo
Harriet Prescott Spofford | The Moonstone Mass
W. C. Morrow | His Unconquerable Enemy
Sarah Orne Jewett | In Dark New England Days
Charlotte Perkins Gilman | The Yellow Wall Paper
Stephen Crane | The Black Dog
Kate Chopin | Ma’ame Pélagie
John Kendrick Bangs | Thurlow’s Christmas Story
Robert W. Chambers | The Repairer of Reputations
Ralph Adams Cram | The Dead Valley
Madeline Yale Wynne | The Little Room
Gertrude Atherton | The Striding Place
Emma Francis Dawson | An Itinerant House
Mary Wilkins Freeman | Luella Miller
Frank Norris | Grettir at Thorhall-stead
Lafcadio Hearn | Yuki-Onna
F. Marion Crawford | For the Blood Is the Life
Ambrose Bierce | The Moonlit Road
Edward Lucas White | Lukundoo
Olivia Howard Dunbar | The Shell of Sense
Henry James | The Jolly Corner
Alice Brown | Golden Baby
Edith Wharton | Afterward
Willa Cather | Consequences
Ellen Glasgow | The Shadowy Third
Julian Hawthorne | Absolute Evil
Francis Stevens | Unseen—Unfeared
F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Seabury Quinn | The Curse of Everard Maundy
Stephen Vincent Benét | The King of the Cats
David H. Keller | The Jelly-Fish
Conrad Aiken | Mr. Arcularis
Robert E. Howard | The Black Stone
Henry S. Whitehead | Passing of a God
August Derleth | The Panelled Room
H. P. Lovecraft | The Thing on the Doorstep
Clark Ashton Smith | Genius Loci
Robert Bloch | The Cloak
Contributors

Conrad Aiken
Gertrude Atherton
John Kendrick Bangs
Stephen Vincent Benét
Ambrose Bierce
Robert Bloch
Alice Brown
Charles Brockden Brown
Willa Cather
Robert W. Chambers
Kate Chopin
Ralph Adams Cram
Stephen Crane
F. Marion Crawford
Emma Francis Dawson
August Derleth
Olivia Howard Dunbar
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Ellen Glasgow
Bret Harte
Julian Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lafcadio Hearn
Robert E. Howard
Washington Irving
Henry James
Sarah Orne Jewett
David H. Keller
H. P. Lovecraft
Herman Melville
W. C. Morrow
Frank Norris
Fitz-James O’Brien
Edgar Allan Poe
Seabury Quinn
Clark Ashton Smith
Harriet Prescott Spofford
Francis Stevens
Edith Wharton
Edward Lucas White
Henry S. Whitehead
Madeline Yale Wynne

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-047-6 746 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 196 Library of America Series

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