American Gothic Tales

by Oates, Joyce Carol; Various

• ISBN13: 9780452274891
• ISBN10: 0452274893
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-12-01
• Publisher: PENGUIN

Summary

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.

Author Biography

In addition to many prize-winning and bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, Black Water, and Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart (available in Plume editions), Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of gothic fiction including Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Plume), a 1995 World Fantasy Award nominee; and Zombie (Plume), winner of the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, awarded by the Horror Writers' Association. In 1994, Oates received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction. She is the editor of American Gothic Tales and her latest novel is Broke Heart Blues (Dutton). She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(9)
from Wieland, or The Transformation	10	(9)
Charles Brockden Brown
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	19	(26)
Washington Irving
The Man of Adamant, Young Goodman Brown	45	(20)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Tartarus of Maids	65	(13)
Herman Melville
The Black Cat	78	(9)
Edgar Allan Poe
The Yellow Wallpaper	87	(16)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes	103	(18)
Henry James
The Damned Thing	121	(8)
Ambrose Bierce
Afterward	129	(28)
Edith Wharton
The Striding Place	157	(6)
Gertrude Atherton
Death in the Woods	163	(12)
Sherwood Anderson
The Outsider	175	(7)
H. P. Lovecraft
A Rose for Emily	182	(9)
William Faulkner
The Lonesome Place	191	(8)
August Derleth
The Door	199	(5)
E. B. White
The Lovely House	204	(22)
Shirley Jackson
Allal	226	(10)
Paul Bowles
The Reencounter	236	(6)
Isaac Bashevis Singer
In the Icebound Hothouse	242	(11)
William Goyen
The Enormous Radio	253	(11)
John Cheever
The Veldt	264	(14)
Ray Bradbury
The Dachau Shoe, The Approved, Spiders I Have Known, Postcards from the Maginot Line	278	(8)
W. S. Merwin
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams	286	(15)
Sylvia Plath
In Bed One Night	301	(3)
Robert Coover
Schrodinger's Cat	304	(8)
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Waterworks	312	(3)
E. L. Doctorow
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin	315	(10)
Harlan Ellison
Human Moments in World War III	325	(14)
Don DeLillo
The Anatomy of Desire	339	(5)
John L'Heureux
Little Things	344	(2)
Raymond Carver
The Temple	346	(3)
Joyce Carol Oates
Freniere	349	(9)
Anne Rice
A Short Guide to the City	358	(11)
Peter Straub
In The Penny Arcade	369	(9)
Steven Millhauser
The Reach	378	(20)
Stephen King
Exchange Value	398	(8)
Charles Johnson
Snow	406	(14)
John Crowley
The Last Feast of Harlequin	420	(35)
Thomas Ligotti
Time and Again	455	(5)
Breece D'J Pancake
Replacements	460	(15)
Lisa Tuttle
Spirit Seizures	475	(11)
Melissa Pritchard
Cat in Glass	486	(14)
Nancy Etchemendy
The Girl Who Loved Animals	500	(18)
Bruce McAllister
Ursus Triad, Later	518	(7)
Kathe Koja
Barry N. Malzberg
The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth	525	(8)
Katherine Dunn
Subsoil	533
Nicholson Baker