In time The New Gothic brilliantly reanimates--and reinvents--the genre of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, celebrating the vigorous return of sophisticated horror. Contributors include Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell, and Peter Straub, among many others. Eeriness abounds."--Washington Post Book World.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Leading contemporary fiction writers from Anne Rice to Martin Amis to Jeanette Winterson contribute first-rank literary stories to this masterful, disturbing collection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Cadillac Gothic with new chrome stripping on stories going to the same old grave, by some heavy-hitters in the rich-prose department. At the Poe pinnacle of Old Gothic, all detail and landscape emerge from the tortured, fragmenting psyche of the hero. No such figure easily defines the New Gothic. Many of these tales--of which Paul West's ``Banquo and the Black Banana: The Fierceness of the Delight of Horror'' is the worst offender (it reads at times like a Burroughs cutup)--are overrich by half, and the straightforwardness of Ruth Rendell's ``For Dear Life,'' Joyce Carol Oates's ``Why Don't You Come Live with Me It's Time,'' and Angela Carter's ``The Merchant of Shadows'' blow like breaths of fresh air through the heavy vapors. The single, most well-focused story herein is Rendell's, about the cramps of horror besetting an old dowager taking her first subway ride in London. The best stylist may well be John Edgar Wideman, whose plague tale, ``Fever,'' opens marvelously: ``He stood staring through a window at the last days of November. The trees were barren women starved for love and they'd stripped off all their clothes, but nobody cared.'' The most far-out tale (that still tells a story) is Robert Coover's ugly but cuckoo ``The Dead Queen,'' a reworking of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from the point of view of Prince Charming on the wedding night: no matter how madly Charming performs in bed, Snow White awakens in the morning with hymen restored (as she has awakened after endless sex with the seven dwarfs before Prince Charming awakened her in the coffin that the vanity-ridden queen now lies in). Most fanciful is a tossup, but John Hawkes's ``Regulus and Maximus,'' about the sins of monks, is superpurple. Anne Rice presents a lacy Lestat the Vampire excerpt from Interview with the Vampire. All weighed together, too much and not enough. Should do well, though. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One story makes the whole book worth reading,
By Eris, "Human Being" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (Hardcover)
I read this in high school, about 10 years ago, so the only thing I really remember is the Jamaica Kincaid story 'Ovando.' I don't remember specifics of it, and maybe it wouldn't affect me now the way it did then, but at the time I was staggered by it. I am so glad I found this book so I can read it again. It's worth reading the book just for this one story, although I remember enjoying the rest of it, too.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting attempt at portraying the genre (if it is a genre),
By
This review is from: New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (Paperback)
Like most anthologies, this does contain a number of excellent pieces, but there are some problems with it as a collection. It looks like they were trying to cobble together the beginnings of a movement, but there is a fair amount of disparity in these pieces. The only thing they have in common is that they are all more or less literary works that present a somewhat gothic sensibility, altho I would argue that a couple of them dont even have that. Included here are works that are overtly gothic, but others that are from very different genres, like experimental fiction. A couple of the pieces are not even short stories, but excerpts from longer works, like a fine clip from Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire (I guess they had to include her), and a completely unnecessary bit from Martin Amis's London Fields (I like Amis, but there is no way you could consider his writing gothic, i.m.o.)
However, there are a few outstanding items here that made it a worthwhile read, and most of them were from women. Do women have a greater ability to write in the gothic mode than men? I loved Angela Carter's "The Merchant of Shadows", a witty take on a Sunset Boulevard-esque scenario. Ruth Rendell contributes one of her cold gems, this one a satirical piece about a posh lady who finds herself taking her first ride on a London tube train and beginning to freak out. Emma Tennant (another British female) checks in with "Rigor Beach", a very dark and perverse little number about a black widow-type who lures a man to her apartment, has sex with him, poisons him , and then has a little fun with the corpse. John Edgar Wideman's "Fever", a story I have seen turn up in other anthologies, is a brilliant (and yes, feverish) depiction of a pandemic disease ravaging a city (that might be Philadelphia) in some decade long past. Other good ones were Jamaica Kincaid's wildly creative "Ovando", McGrath's "The Smell" about a puritanical man's obsession with a strange smell in his home, Jeanette Winterson's sketch of a neighborhood oddball, and Scott Bradfield's "Didn't She Know", in which a sexy girl flirts (harmlessly, she thinks) with a bunch of lonely old retirees. Morrow's story about a man who compulsively steals little prized possessions from people was interesting as well. Some of the other pieces were well-written, but the content did not particularly grab me. Overall this was a mixed bag. I am not sure how much the editors had to work with - I mean, there are a few McGraths and Rendells out there, but is adult gothic fiction really a big field that produces a lot of short stories? Maybe not.
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