American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (Library of America) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In a time when the Fantastic is regaining popularity in American literature, this wide-ranging collection of horror and supernatural stories is a welcomed reeducation into the genre's roots. Some of the selections are already unquestioned classics-Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Poe's "Berenice," Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper." Although, any reader may find Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, David H. Keller, Seabury Quinn, Francis Stevens, H.L. Lovecraft and August Derleth just as worthy. Even those most well-acquainted with the genre will be pleasantly surprised with the tales by lesser-known writers, such as Willa Cather's "Consequences" and Gertrude Atherton's "The Striding Place." Editor Straub highlights a Feminist strain with female writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Harriet Prescott Spoofed, Kate Chopin, Madeline Yale Wynne, Alice Brown-to name a few, offering an interesting reassessment of a crucial era in fantastic fiction.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Dennis Drabelle Inside this double-decker set lurks more spookiness than you can shake a broomstick at: four score and more tales, written by horripilating favorites (H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite); mainstream powerhouses (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, John Cheever); and revenants from the crypt of literary obscurity (Madeline Yale Wynne, W.C. Morrow, Seabury Quinn). Until now, the best and bulkiest anthology of its kind was Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser's "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural" (1944). But these new, paired volumes, edited by novelist Peter Straub of "Ghost Story" fame, almost double the length of "Great Tales" while casting a wider net. Wise and Fraser eschewed authors who published mainly in pulp magazines (with the notable exception of Lovecraft), but Straub embraces pulpiness in the first volume's subtitle. The idea seems to be that, whatever the source, all goose bumps are created equal. I'll shiver to that. Few of Straub's choices feature ghosts as such, yet so much weirdness stalks through these volumes that one can only flail at it. The news about Madeline Yale Wynne, for example, is good. Her entry, "The Little Room," is a sleek little number, with just the right measure of ambiguity. The protagonist remembers playing in a certain room during childhood stays with her aunts; but when she returns years later, that room is -- and always has been -- a "shallow china-closet." Or so say the aunts, who tense up when the subject is raised. Did something awful happen in there? Have they remodeled the house to wall up any lingering after-effects? Wynne rides her premise for all it's worth, toying with the reader for 13 pages until -- well, step into "The Little Room" yourself. I also recommend "Mr. Lupescu," by Anthony Boucher, after whom a well-known mystery writers' convention is named. The story takes a familiar subject, a kid with an imaginary friend, and transforms it into a tour de force with not one but two climactic shocks. I recently read it aloud to friends at a country house, and the reaction was everything an amateur bogeyman could ask for. Speaking of familiar subjects, M. Rickert's "The Chambered Fruit" works a nice variation on W.W. Jacobs's classic story "The Monkey's Paw": You may think that having a beloved relative come back from the dead would be heavenly, but in this case it's hellish. One of the more rewarding stories is T.E.D. Klein's "The Events at Poroth Farm," and not just because it's well told. The narrator is a teacher who happens to be mapping out a course in the Gothic literary tradition, and he occasionally interrupts his account of those baleful "events" at the farm to tell us what he's reading for work and what he thinks of it. So, for example, when he brings up Arthur Machen's "The White People," he adds that "it must be the most persuasive horror tale ever written." This is an assessment I happen to agree with, and by including Klein's tale, Straub has handed readers an unexpected bonus: a mini-survey of the very field that his anthology covers. (For the record, Machen was a Brit, so "The White People" is ineligible for "American Fantastic Tales.") Some stories are included because they simply have to be: You can't very well do justice to the dark side of the American soul if you leave out Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wall Paper" or Ellen Glasgow's "The Shadowy Third" (and both, as it happens, are unforgettable). Other choices seem to represent dogged recovery efforts by the editor. How nice, for example, to find not only a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne but also one by Julian, his overshadowed son. Occasionally, Straub may claim too much for one of his picks. He calls Kelly Link a "central figure" among the ultra-ambitious new horror writers who defy the limitations of genre. Maybe so, but the Link story he presents, "Stone Animals," has a fatal flaw: The animal menaces are bunnies! My mind kept drifting to President Jimmy Carter and the "killer rabbit" that once rocked his boat. On the whole, however, the two volumes are a model of the editorial art. Brimming over with dread, these stories represent a recurrent meeting of two minds: that of the writer who wants to make flesh crawl and that of the reader whose flesh is hot to get a move on. [e-mail]
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 750 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (October 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159853047X
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530476
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #117,339 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good collection of Horror Stories...wait, can I say that?, October 6, 2009

By	C. Kelleher "cmkelleher" (new york, ny United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

These volumes offer an immense amount of excellent material in an attractive and durable format and most horror / supernatural fans will have no doubts about snapping these up. There are a few caveats, some typical of Library of America volumes, and several specifically related to Straub's editorial choices but as long as you don't object too strenuously to these small issues, there is no serious impairment to purchase.

First, LoA never allocates enough space for editors. Straub has a wee tiny 3 page intro and a few biographical notes on the authors at the end of each volume, and there is no preface to each story or end notes on thematic topics. This means you the reader have no idea as to why this author or that specific story is included in the volume. Compared to say "The Dark Descent"'s approach, this parsimony is unfortunate and occasionally frustrating. Why for instance is the peculiar and cloying "Golden Baby" in here? How and why is Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" a "fantastic tale"? Why select the given Lovecraft story over all others in his repertoire? The absence of thematic notes is a bit more annoying here than in a single author collection as the wide-ranging assortment of tales grouped together without explanation or context can seem especially puzzling due to the wide range of moods and styles found here. Anyway, these are minor issues - the appeal of most stories herein is straightforward, and the reader can always do some follow-up research to assess the reputation and impact of a given writer on the horror field..

Second LoA issue - the limited scope and convenience of textual notes. The LoA series never uses actual numbering of notes in text, so the reader has to flip ahead to the endnotes at the rear of the volume whenever he is confronted with a puzzling line of text. The end notes are pretty sparse and limited, so often one will flip to the end and find nothing. The reader soon tires of flipping back and forth, meaning most of the limited number of end notes are never read by the reader. You can look at the endnotes section after reading each story, but at that point getting info on allusions and references made is rather pointless. As suggested, there could probably be some more endnotes here, and those that are here should be properly numbered within the text - the S.T. Joshi approach found in his annotated Lovecraft for Penguin is still the gold standard.

First Straub issue - the usual "colonial cringe" phenomenon found in broadly scoped genre anthologies, where a mediocre piece by a "big name" gets chucked in to the mix to try to elevate the tone of the collection - "oh, look, John Steinbeck wrote a vampire story, let's include it to show that horror isn't the ghetto that the literati say that it is...". From the genre reader's perspective, if Mr. Steinbeck's hypothetical vampire tale is not a particularly good one, its inclusion is not at all worthwhile, and snooty intellectuals are unlikely to rethink their dearly held prejudices about genre work because a big name tried to pay the bills once by writing something supernatural. In the current volume, the works by Melville, Fitzgerald, and Dawson stand out as being both mediocre tales and also square pegs wedged into roundish holes.

Second Straub issue - as with other Straub anthologies ("Poe's Children"), his editorial tastes run to the more erudite and intellectual, so if your tastes run in a more pulpy direction, you may be saddened to see some works excluded and others included. Of the tales included, the pieces by Crane and Bangs are attempts at high-brow cleverness that fall flat, and the Julian Hawthorne piece is surely the most intellectual and arid approach to that old saw, the werewolf story, that could be imagined.

This content complaint would happen with virtually any anthology though, so this is hardly a significant issue. Finally though, bear in mind these tales are probably 90% what might be called "horror" so if you are hoping for jumping frogs or Rip Van Winkle, you are probably going to be disappointed. Calling this "American Horror Stories" or "American Supernatural Tales" would probably have been more honest, but I suppose "Fantastic Tales" is more upscale.

As with all LoA volumes, the binding, print and paper quality are impeccable and these books are heirloom class items that can readily be passed down to one's descendants. Volume I is highly worthwhile and although it could use more editorial material and more detailed notes better integrated into the text, this collection will provide many hours of good reading and even veteran horror buffs (oops, excuse me, fantastic tale connoisseurs) will find more than a few new delights herein.

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome! Fabulous! FANTASTIQUE!!!, January 27, 2010

By	W. H. Pugmire "I never can be tied to raw, ne... (Sesqua Valley) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love almost all of the stories in this first volume of American Fantastic Tales edited by Peter Straub. (But, Peter darling, I have to agree with S. T. concerning ye Seabury Quinn tale -- phooey!) I was especially happy to see so many women writers in this first edition, including Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and some with whom I am completely unfamiliar. To be introduced to authors that I have not read is one of the aspects that makes such a book a real treasure. Too, there are stories of which I have read but have not been able to locate. One such tale is Conrad Aiken's "Mr. Arcularis," and it is sublime. I was very happy to see a tale by August Derleth. Whatever may be said of some of his squamous Cthulhu Mythos stories (which he wrote when very young and with no serious intent), Derleth could write a fine weird tale, and "The Panelled Room" publish'd in this anthology is superb. Some have accus'd Derleth's tale of being a rip-off of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper," -- which is also included in this volume, & thus a comparison may be made.

There have been some quibbles about choice of tales. S. T. Joshi has ungenerously condemn'd ye choice of what he considers one of H. P. Lovecraft's lousy stories, "The Thing on the Doorstep." Great Yuggoth! The story is FASCINATING! It contains one of Lovecraft's most perverse ideas, the soul of a father ravaging, so to speak, the soul of his daughter; the exchange of a male personality with a female personality; the marriage of a man to a woman who houses within her the soul of another man! From a psychological point of view, the idea of the character of Asenath Waite representing a (perhaps subconscious) portrayal of Lovecraft's Mother and of his wife is intriguing. As a horror story, this eerie nasty yarn is extremely effective. It is uniquely Lovecraftian and its appearance in this anthology is right-on!

I would have chosen a different Bloch story, preferring his fine "The Shadow from the Steeple" or "Return to the Sabbath" or the very odd "Enoch" to the amusing but not substantial "The Cloak." But that's just me. I love this first volume, and it is a book to which I will return time and again.

Now -- if only Mr. Straub cou'd convince The Library of America to publish a second H. P. Lovecraft volume!!!