Customer Reviews

American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's UntilNow (Library of America)

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Like Volume I of this series, Straub has put together a big and generally impressive volume of American supernatural tales, which is confined in an impressively elegant and durable physical format that is of collectable quality. This second volume is a tad rockier going than the first volume, as Straub pursues the lofty illusion of literary quality rather than the workmanlike cause of offering specific works from the horror genre. As a a result, horror cognoscenti will feel more than a few errors of both omission and inclusion occurred...

Surprisingly the stuff by the more well know literary figures like Nabokov, Williams, Bowles, Capote, and Cheever is at least decent and actually surprisingly strong in some cases and probably will not offend genre fans. The names missing is probably a more distressing roster: no Ted Sturgeon, Manly Wade Wellman, Ed Bryant, no Karl Edward Wagner (worst absence of all IMO), no Russell Kirk and (another gaping hole) no Dennis Etchison. This trend also is seen chronologically with more work being selected from later decades and the 60s-80s being covered pretty lightly. Straub obviously has weighted this collection more towards authors he knows personally and views as being relevant to contemporary literary trends.

So we get such luminaries included as Crowley, Chabon, and Powers, good writers, but who are more beloved of NYRB readers than of Cemetery Dance subscribers. None of this is really problematic save perhaps the tedious Crowley piece which is drawn out, meandering, and which has not the least aspect of "terror" or "the uncanny" in it. We also have the required Kelly Link piece. To my perhaps more plain styled tastes, Ms Link strikes me as quaint and cutesy, the Lorrie Moore of our genre. She is to horror as Sinatra is to death metal. At least though we are spared Sharyn McCrumb's "chicken fried ghosts of NASCAR" stuff...

We also get some kind of poor pieces from writers who have done better stuff. The King piece included surely is not one of his most impressive work in this field (though hey it was in the New Yorker, so it has all that fancy pants haute couture feel to it). We also have a pointless piece from Chappell, and what we could really call a fragment from Vandemeer.

Any anthologist will make some questionable choices, and the only regrettable thing here is that Straub included some dicey stuff at the expense of some other better and more representative work by authors more firmly associated with the horror genre. The iconic nature of this anthology makes this a rare chance to introduce high-brows to the horror genre, and I feel it would have been a better concept to show them a great Wagner piece than a rather ordinary Tennessee Williams ghost story, or worse yet, Crowley nattering on about some author musing on the nature of reality and Art.

Anyway, not my call, and the truth is that there is lots of excellent work here, more than enough to justify the price of admission. Literary types will have a good time, and horror fans will be generally satisfied, though with a certain amount of grumbling and sighs at missed opportunities.

This is the second of two Library of America collections edited by Peter Straub, this one covering the period since 1940. "Fantastic tales" is not an easy term to define--basically these are stories with an uncanny twist, such as used to pop up on the old "Suspense radio program, or on "Twilight Zone" (in fact, several of the authors wrote for that classic TV series). "Spooky" stories, but not tales of "horror." Like all LoA volumes, this one has many helpful features, especially when dealing with a story collection. Straub offers a very helpful introduction, placing the stories within loose categories. One of the most interesting features consists of brief "biographical notes" on each of the authors, outlining their backgrounds. There are also 5 pages of notes which define terms which might be unfamiliar, especially since many of the stories were written in the late 1940's and the 1950's.

The authors range from the well known (e.g., Capote, King, Nabokov, Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Finney, and even Tennessee Williams) through many with whom I was not familiar. All told, there are around 40 or so stories in the 684 page collection. I only found one that was not excellent; so the editor has done a fine job in making his selections. I do want to make it clear, though, the these "uncanny" stories are not science fiction, as I would understand the term, though some have a bit of sf overtones. Really, their key characterstic is a "gotcha" unique twist or two that is most surprising. Straub has edited a second earlier volume covering "Poe to the Pulps" which I bet is equally fascinating. Since this volume contains stories bridging such a long period, it is interesting to see how fantastic stories have evolved over time. Even younger readers will, I think, find these stories well worth reading.

It's hard to really assign a genre to the stories in this collection---"fantastic" is a good word to use. They aren't all horror, they aren't really sci-fi, they aren't fantasy really. What ties them all together is a weirdness---something happening that would not really happen, something off-beat and odd. They are exactly the kind of stories I love reading, and it was a huge treat to find a collection of them! What I enjoyed especially was seeing new sides of writers I've read before, but not when they were doing this kind of writing, like Joyce Carol Oates or Tennessee Williams. A few stories I consider to be standouts---Pop Art, by Joe Hill, who is Stephen King's son---a bizarre story of a boy that is literally a blow up toy, The Little Stranger by Gene Wolfe, one of those stories that creeps up on you and has hints of all kinds of fairy tales but never gets beyond the subtle, The Chambered Fruit, by M. Rickert, a grieving and ghost story, Trace, by Jerome Bixby---very short and very creepy, A Short Guide to the City by Peter Straub---a city description where the horror creeps up on you...and a lot more. Of course, like with any collection, there are a few stories that weren't to my taste, but it would not be a collection reaching for excellence if one person could like every single story. I like the way the stories are arranged by year published, so you can see how styles changed over the years and which stories seemed to be ahead of or behind their time. Many hours of happy reading here!

Used copies don't always come with the paper cover, but that's my own complaint, if a complaint at all. If you like fiction of the "Weird Tale," you'll really enjoy the fiction in here. It has works from classics like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and more. Some of the best ones in my opinion are Beaumont's "Black Country" and Jackson's The Daemon Lover." I definitely recommend this one.