American Gothic Tales

American Gothic Tales is an anthology of "gothic" American short fiction. Edited and with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, it was published by Plume in 1996. It featured contributions by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice and others, and included over 40 stories.^[1]

Contents

American Gothic Tales

• Introduction

• Excerpt from introduction: "My original intention in assembling American Gothic Tales was to provide an historic overview of "gothicism" in our literature and, of course, to bring together favorite, distinctive stories. As the months passed and I immersed myself in reading, particularly in the burgeoning contemporary field, I discovered that frank eroticism and female-male relations are no longer taboo in gothic tales (see Lisa Tuttle's ominous "Replacements" and Kathe Koja's and Barry N. Malzberg's lyrically sadomasochistic "Ursus Triad, Later"); and that an older classic like Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" has acquired, in our age of children's and adolescents' video games, a terrifying prescience..." ^[1]

• 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

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page - Dust Jacket Blurb, Introduction, Contents"
2. ^ http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Afte.shtml
3. ^ "East of the Web, Short Stories. The Striding Place Full Text"
4. ^ "The Weird Worlds of Nancy Etchemendy"

External links

• Amazon, American Gothic Tales
• Celestial Timepiece - A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page - American Gothic Tales