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

About this book

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 edgesif not in the unacknowledged heartof the everyday. Peter Straub one of todays 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 forty-four 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 Crams The Dead Valley Emma Francis Dawsons An Itinerant House and Julian Hawthornes Absolute Evil. American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date authoritative editions that average 1 000 pages in length feature cloth covers sewn bindings and ribbon markers and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.