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 visiona world askew where mankinds forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawlessJoyce Carol Oates includes Henry Jamess The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, Herman Melvilles horrific tale of factory women, The Tartarus of Maids, and Edith Whartons 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 writers subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oatess superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didnt create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.
