Two volumes of short stories edited by Peter Straub publish today, and this is one collection that belongs on the library shelves of everyone who loves tales of mystery and suspense. It was such a thrill for us to reread stories we had once read and enjoyed so long ago, and to discover new ones that we'll undoubtedly recall for a long time to come.
The first volume is American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps and includes 44 stories with 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." This volume of short stories offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms.
The second volume is American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s Until Now picks up the story in 1940 and provides persuasive evidence that the decades since then have seen an extraordinary flowering. While continuing to explore the classic themes of horror and fantasy, successive generations of writers- including Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser, and Thomas Ligotti-have opened up the field to new subjects, new styles, and daringly fresh expansions of the genre's emotional and philosophical underpinnings. For many of these writers, the fantastic is simply the best available tool for describing the dislocations and newly hatched terrors of the modern era, from the nightmarish post-apocalyptic savagery of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" to proliferating identities set deliriously adrift in Tim Powers' "Pat Moore."
Nearly half the stories collected in this volume were published in the last two decades, including work by Michael Chabon, M. Rickert, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, and Benjamin Percy, writers for whom traditional genre boundaries have ceased to exist, and who have brought the fantastic into the mainstream of contemporary writing. The 42 stories in this second volume provide an irresistible journey into the phantasmagoric underside of the American imagination.
Both volumes are also available as a boxed set: American Fantastic Tales (boxed set), edited by Peter Straub.
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