American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Edgar Allan Poe • Bret Harte • Charlotte Perkins Gilman • Ambrose Bierce • Edith Wharton • Ellen Glasgow • Robert E. Howard • H. P. Lovecraft • Clark Ashton Smith • Robert Bloch • and 34 others

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.

See the complete table of contents.

Peter Straub, editor, is the author of 18 novels, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. He edited H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, volume #155 of The Library of America series.

Note: This Library of America volume features the standard series specifications (trim size, paper, cloth, Smyth-sewn binding, ribbon) and a special jacket designed by graphic designer Chip Kidd.

Also of interest:
Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches
H. P. Lovecraft: Tales
Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales

Please direct all media inquiries, including review copy requests, to:
Liza Lucas, Publicist
Goldberg McDuffie Communications, Inc.
llucas@goldbergmcduffie.com

Please direct all course adoption inquiries to:
info@LOAacademic.org

Copyright 1995–2007 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
Contact Us | Privacy and Security