American Gothic Tales

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. 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. 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. 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.

Added 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 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. 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.

rom Wieland, or The transformation / Charles Brockden Brown —
The legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving —
The man of adamant / Nathaniel Hawthorne —
Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne —
The Tartarus of maids / Herman Melville —
The black cat / Edgar Allan Poe —
The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman —
The romance of certain old clothes / Henry James —
The damned thing / Ambrose Bierce —
Afterward / Edith Wharton —
The striding place / Gertrude Atherton —
Death in the woods / Sherwood Anderson —
The outsider / H.P. Lovecraft —
A rose for Emily / William Faulkner —
The lonesome place / August Derleth —
The door / E.B. White —
The lovely house / Shirley Jackson —
Allal / Paul Bowles —
The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer —
In the icebound hothouse / William Goyen —
The enormous radio / John Cheever —
The veldt / Ray Bradbury —
The Dachau shoe / W.S. Merwin —
The approved / W.S. Merwin —
Spiders I have known / W.S. Merwin —
Postcards from the Maginot Line / W.S. Merwin —
Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams / Sylvia Plath —
In bed one night / Robert Coover —
Schrödinger’s cat / Ursula K. Le Guin —
The waterworks / E.L. Doctorow —
Shattered like a glass goblin / Harlan Ellison —
Human moments in World War III / Don DeLillo —
The anatomy of desire / John L’Heureux —
Little things / Raymond Carver —
The temple / Joyce Carol Oates —
Freniere (from Interview with the Vampires) / Anne Rice —
A short guide to the city / Peter Straub —
In the penny arcade / Steven Millhauser —
The reach / Stephen King —
Exchange value / Charles Johnson —
Snow / John Crowley —
The last feast of Harlequin / Thomas Ligotti —
Time and again / Breece D’J Pancake–
Replacements / Lisa Tuttle —
Spirit seizures / Melissa Pritchard —
Cat in glass / Nancy Etchemendy —
The girl who loved animals / Bruce McAllister —
Ursus Triad, later / Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg —
(from Geek Love) The nuclear family: his talk, her teeth / Katherine Dunn —
Subsoil / Nicholson Baker