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Loading... American Gothic Tales (1996)by Joyce Carol Oates (Editor, Contributor)A selection of tales about the strange and uncanny written by American writers, ranging from classics to contemporary. For the most part, this is a terrific collection of stories, but do they deserve the label "gothic?" The earliest stories most definitely do, and they are probably the strongest in the collection, beginning with the classic "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and featuring selections by Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Bierce, James, Lovecraft, Derleth, a wonderful ghost story by Edith Wharton, Gilman's classic "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the timeless Southern gothic story "A Rose for Emily" by Faulkner. This is a terrific representation of classic American gothic writing. After a standout story by Shirley Jackson, "The Lovely House," which was probably my favorite of the anthology, more contemporary writers are featured, and the stories become less gothic for a time. While Raymond Carver and John Cheever are justifiably well known for their short stories, I don't think they can be called gothic. And science fiction is pretty much the opposite of gothic; while I enjoyed those selections by Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others, they just didn't fit the theme for me, other than that they were strange. The most modern writers do, for the most part, return to secure gothic ground, with great selections by Stephen King, Peter Straub, Lisa Tuttle (an outstanding story called "Replacements"), and Nancy Etchemendy's disturbing "Cat in Glass." Nicholson Baker rounds out the collection with a fun piece called "Subsoil" that makes potatoes seem frightening. It's a solid collection of stories on the whole and well worth seeking out, despite the intrusion of the non-gothic into the collection. This is a superbly edited and very accessible collection. Oates has carefully balanced the pieces across a wide array of variables - chronology, subject, length, and style. There is some overlap between this collection and Peter Straub's daunting 2-volume collection "American Fantastic Tales", but Oates' work is a more focused and shrewdly selected survey of essentially the same themes. This huge collection was used as a textbook for one of my graduate classes. The forty-six stories included follow the development and evolution of the Gothic genre from an excerpt of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Weiland, or The Transformation through Nicholson Baker’s 1994 short story “Subsoil.” The collection is intended, as far as I can tell, to gather not only the more significant stories of the genre, but also important stories that may typically go unnoticed by most readers. It is the latter of these which makes this collection so special, I think. ~~Continued on my website (www.robbflynn.com)~~ Charles Brockden Brown - Wieland; or, the Transformation Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Man of Adamant, Young Goodman Brown Herman Melville - The Tartarus of Maids -- A paradox of a heaven, Paradise, and a hell, Tartarus, hidden in a valley called "Devil's Dungeon". Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat -- Gouging Pluto's eye out with a pen-knife, this was the beginning of the end! Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper Henry James - The Romance of Certain Old Clothes Ambrose Bierce - That Damned Thing -- "....there are things in the natural world the human eye cannot see or the human ear could hear." Edith Wharton - Afterward -- "You won't know till long, long afterward." [2] Gertrude Atherton - The Striding Place -- "...A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy..." [3] Sherwood Anderson - Death in the Woods H. P. Lovecraft - The Outsider William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily August Derleth - The Lonesome Place E. B. White - The Door Shirley Jackson - The Lovely House Paul Bowles - Allal Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Reencounter William Goyen - In the Icebound Hothouse John Cheever - The Enormous Radio Ray Bradbury - The Veldt W. S. Merwin - The Dachau Shoe, The Approved, Spiders I Have Known, Postcards from the Maginot Line Sylvia Plath - Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams Robert Coover - In Bed One Night Ursula K. Le Guin - Schrodinger's Cat E. L. Doctorow - The Waterworks Harlan Ellison - Shattered Like a Glass Goblin Don DeLillo - Human Moments in World War III John L'Heureux - The Anatomy of Desire Raymond Carver - Little Things Joyce Carol Oates - The Temple Anne Rice - Freniere Peter Straub - A Short Guide to the City Steven Millhauser - In the Penny Arcade Stephen King - The Reach Charles R. Johnson - Exchange Value John Crowley - Snow Thomas Ligotti - The Last Feast of Harlequin Breece D'J Pancake - "Time and Again" Lisa Tuttle - Replacements -- Stuart stomps and kills an ugly creature on the street only to find his wife is caring for one of these "things"! Melissa Pritchard - Spirit Seizures Nancy Etchemendy - Cat in Glass -- "Is the sculpture in "Cat in Glass" an artistic masterpiece—or an evil idol, capable of murder?" [4] Bruce McAllister - The Girl Who Loved Animals Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg - Ursus Triad, Later Katherine Dunn - The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth Nicholson Baker - Subsoil |
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