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

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this second installment, Straub ventures onto somewhat more adventurous ground. His selections bring readers completely up to date with the genre, featuring tales from even the newest writers, such as M. Rickert and Joe Hill. This thorough anthology is likely to replace Fraser and Wise's 1944 Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural as a lib. It foreshadows the careers of writers who may very well turn out to be classics. Straub's reach is admirably broad, bringing to light worthy but under the radar talents such as Jane Rice and Jack Snow, both pulp writers who flourished briefly at the beginning of the "modern" era. Yet, he leaves room for the more mainstream writers: Jerome Bixby, Donald Wandrei, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and Poppy Z. Brite alongside Shirley Jackson, Paul Bowles, Joy Carol Oates, and Truman Capote. Straub incorporates such writers with originality: choosing, for example, to use Tennessee Williams' "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio" for once rather than his more common "The Vengeance of Nitocris." The anthology has genuinely imaginative writing and editorial vision.

Product Description

The second volume of Peter Straub's pathbreaking anthology American Fantastic Tales picks up the story in 1940 and provides persuasive evidence that the decades since then have seen an extraordinary flowering. While continuing to explore the classic themes of horror and fantasy, successive generations of writers- including Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser, and Thomas Ligotti-have opened up the field to new subjects, new styles, and daringly fresh expansions of the genre's emotional and philosophical underpinnings. For many of these writers, the fantastic is simply the best available tool for describing the dislocations and newly hatched terrors of the modern era, from the nightmarish post- apocalyptic savagery of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" to proliferating identities set deliriously adrift in Tim Powers' "Pat Moore."
"At its core," writes editor Peter Straub, "the fantastic is a way of seeing." In place of gothic trappings, the post-war masters of the fantastic often substitute an air of apparent normality. The surfaces of American life-department store displays in John Collier's "Evening Primrose," tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost," the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams' "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio"-become invested with haunting presences. The sphere of family life is transformed, in Davis Grubb's "Where the Woodbine Twineth" or Richard Matheson's "Prey," into an arena of eerie menace. Dramas of madness, malevolent temptation, and vampiristic appropriation play themselves out against the backdrop of modern urban life in John Cheever's "Torch Song" and Shirley Jackson's unforgettable "The Daemon Lover."
Nearly half the stories collected in this volume were published in the last two decades, including work by Michael Chabon, M. Rickert, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, and Benjamin Percy: writers for whom traditional genre boundaries have ceased to exist, and who have brought the fantastic into the mainstream of contemporary writing. The 42 stories in this second volume of American Fantastic Tales provide an irresistible journey into the phantasmagoric underside of the American imagination.

"An encompassing and essential voyage to the dark side of the moon of American literature." -Jonathan Lethem

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 750 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (October 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598530488
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530483
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #203,560 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Genre fights literary mainstream, genre generally gets the worst of it, October 20, 2009

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

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.