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]
- 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!
- 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]
- E. B. White - The Door
- W. S. Merwin - The Dachau Shoe, The Approved, Spiders I Have Known, Postcards from the Maginot Line
- Robert Coover - In Bed One Night
- Don DeLillo - Human Moments in World War III
- John L'Heureux - The Anatomy of Desire
- Anne Rice - Freniere
- Charles R. Johnson - Exchange Value
- Thomas Ligotti - The Last Feast of Harlequin
- 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
