This October, The Library of America is celebrating the foundations of fantasy and horror in American literature by publishing the two-volume American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub. The first volume, Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, kicks off with an 1805 story by Charles Brockden Brown, and takes us through Robert Bloch’s “The Cloak” (1939). Book two, Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s Until Now, picks up immediately after, starting with John Collier’s “Evening Primrose” (1940), and concludes with Benjamin Percy’s “Dial Tone” from 2007. The two books are also offered as a single boxed set. The LOA’s web site is offering ten percent discounts on each book, or a 20% discount on the boxed set.
Describing the first book, LOA says: “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.”
Continuing on to book two, they say: “The second volume of Peter Straub’s pathbreaking two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales 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’.
“‘At its core,’ writes editor Peter Straub, ‘the fantastic is a way of seeing.’ In place of gothic trappings, the post-war masters of the fantastic often substitute an air of apparent normality. The surfaces of American life—department store displays in John Collier’s ‘Evening Primrose’, tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leiber’s ‘Smoke Ghost’, the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams’ ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’—become invested with haunting presences. The sphere of family life is transformed, in Davis Grubb’s ‘Where the Woodbine Twineth’ or Richard Matheson’s ‘Prey’, into an arena of eerie menace. Dramas of madness, malevolent temptation, and vampiristic appropriation play themselves out against the backdrop of modern urban life in John Cheever’s ‘Torch Song’ and Shirley Jackson’s unforgettable ‘The Daemon Lover’.
“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 of American Fantastic Tales provide an irresistible journey into the phantasmagoric underside of the American imagination.”
Here are the tables of contents for the two volumes, along with original publication dates for the individual stories:
Volume 1:
Introduction by Peter Straub
“Somnambulism: A Fragment” by Charles Brockden Brown (1805)
“Adventure of the German Student Irving” by Washington Irving (1824)
“Berenice” by Edgar Allan Poe (1835)
“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)
“The Tartarus of Maids” by Herman Melville (1855)
“What Was It?” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1859)
“The Legend of Monte del Diablo” by Bret Harte (1863)
“The Moonstone Mass” by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868)
“His Unconquerable Enemy” by W.C. Morrow (1889)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
“Ma’ame Pélagie” by Kate Chopin (1893)
“Thurlow’s Christmas Story” by John Kendrick Bangs (1894)
“The Repairer of Reputations” by Robert W. Chambers (1895)
“The Dead Valley” by Ralph Adams Cram (1895)
“The Little Room” by Madeleine Yale Wynne (1895)
“The Striding Place” by Gertrude Atherton (1896)
“In Dark New England Days” by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)
“An Itinerant House” by Emma Francis Dawson (1897)
“The Black Dog” by Stephen Crane (1898)
“Luella Miller” by Mary Wilkins Freeman (1902)
“Grettir at Thornhall-Stead” by Frank Norris (1903)
“Yuki-Onna” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904)
“For the Blood Is the Life” by F. Marion Crawford (1905)
“The Moonlit Road” by Ambrose Bierce (1907)
“Lukundoo” by Edward Lucas White (1907)
“The Shell of Sense” by Olivia Howard Dunbar (1908)
“The Jolly Corner” by Henry James (1908)
“Golden Baby” by Alice Brown (1910)
“Afterward” by Edith Wharton (1910)
“Consequences” by Willa Cather (1915)
“The Shadowy Third” by Ellen Glasgow (1916)
“The Island of Ghosts” by Julian Hawthorne (1919)
“Unseen—Unfeared” by Francis Stevens (1919)
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)
“The Curse of Everard Maundy” by Seabury Quinn (1927)
“The King of the Cats” by Stephen Vincent Benet (1929)
“The Jelly-Fish” by David H. Keller (1929)
“Mr. Arcularis” by Conrad Aiken (1931)
“The Black Stone” by Robert E. Howard (1931)
“Passing of a God” by Henry S. Whitehead (1931)
“The Panelled Room” by August Derlth (1933)
“The Thing on the Doorstep” by H.P. Lovecraft (1933)
“Genius Loci” by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)
“The Cloak” by Robert Bloch (1939)
Volume 2:
Introduction by Peter Straub
“Evening Primrose” by John Collier (1940)
“Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber (1941)
“Mysteries of the Joy Rio” by Tennessee Williams (1941)
“The Refugee” by Jane Rice (1943)
“Mr. Lupescu” by Anthony Boucher (1945)
“Miriam” by Truman Capote (1945)
“Midnight” by Jack Snow (1947)
“Torch Song” by John Cheever (1947)
“I’m Scared” by Jack Finney (1948)
“The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson (1949)
“The Circular Valley” by Paul Bowles (1950)
“The April Witch” by Ray Bradbury (1952)
“Black Country” by Charles Beaumont (1954)
“The Vane Sisters” by Vladimir Nabokov (1959)
“Trace” by Jerome Bixby (1964)
“Where the Woodbine Twineth” by Davis Grubb (1964)
“Nightmare” by Donald Wandrei (1965)
“I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (1967)
“Prey” by Richard Matheson (1969)
“Events at Poroth Farm” by T.E.D. Klein (1972)
“Hanka” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1974)
“Linneaus Forgets” by Fred Chappell (1977)
“Novelty” by John Crowley (1983)
“Mr. Fiddlehead” by Jonathan Carroll (1989)
“Family” by Joyce Carol Oates (1989)
“The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti (1990)
“A Short Guide to the City” by Peter Straub (1990)
“The General Who Is Dead” by Jeff VanderMeer (1996)
“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French” by Stephen King (1998)
“The Long Hall on the Top Floor” by Caitlin R. Kiernan (1999)
“Sea Oak” by George Saunders (2000)
“Nocturne” by Thomas Tessier (2000)
“The God of Dark Laughter” by Michael Chabon (2001)
“Pop Art” by Joe Hill (2001)
“Pansu” by Poppy Z. Brite (2003)
“Dangerous Laughter” by Steven Millhauser (2003)
“The Chambered Fruit” by M. Rickert (2003)
“The Wavering Knife” by Brian Evenson (2004)
“Stone Animals” by Kelly Link (2004)
“Pat Moore” by Tim Powers (2004)
“The Little Stranger” by Gene Wolfe (2004)
“Dial Tone” by Benjamin Percy (2007)