American Fantastic Tales - Peter Straub

Volume 1: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps



From early on, American literature has teemed with tales of horror,

of hauntings, of terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the

uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted

by the unknown and the irrational. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology

demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden

chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new

themes as it explores the bad dreams that lurk around the edges-if not

in the unacknowledged heart of the everyday. Peter Straub, one of today’s

masters of horror and fantasy, offers an authoritative and diverse gathering

of stories calculated to unsettle and delight.



This first volume surveys a century and a half of American fantastic

storytelling, revealing in its 44 stories an array of recurring themes:

trance states, sleepwalking, mesmerism, obsession, possession, madness,

exotic curses, evil atmospheres. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne,

the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with

the forces of darkness. In the ghost haunted Victorian and Edwardian

eras, writers including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce explore ever more refined

varieties of spectral invasion and disintegrating selfhood.



In the twentieth century, with the arrival of the era of the pulps,

the fantastic took on more monstrous and horrific forms at the hands

of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and other classic

contributors to Weird Tales. Here are works by acknowledged masters

such as Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Conrad Aiken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald,

along with surprising discoveries like Ralph Adams Cram’s The Dead Valley,

Emma Francis Dawson’s An Itinerant House, and Julian Hawthorne’s Absolute

Evil. American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through

strange and visionary realms.



1.  Charles Brockden Brown.......Somnambulism: A Fragment

2.  Washington Irving............The Adventure of the German Student

3.  Edgar Allan Poe..............Berenice

4.  Nathaniel Hawthorne..........Young Goodman Brown

5.  Herman Melville..............The Tartarus of Maids

6.  Fitz-James OBrien............What Was It?

7.  Bret Harte...................The Legend of Monte del Diablo

8.  Harriet Prescott Spofford....The Moonstone Mass

9.  W. C. Morrow.................His Unconquerable Enemy

10. Sarah Orne Jewett............In Dark New England Days

11. Charlotte Perkins Gilman.....The Yellow Wall Paper

12. Stephen Crane................The Black Dog

13. Kate Chopin..................Maame Pagie

14. John Kendrick Bangs..........Thurlows Christmas Story

15. Robert W. Chambers...........The Repairer of Reputations

16. Ralph Adams Cram.............The Dead Valley

17. Madeline Yale Wynne..........The Little Room

18. Gertrude Atherton............The Striding Place

19. Emma Francis Dawson..........An Itinerant House

20. Mary Wilkins Freeman.........Luella Miller

21. Frank Norris.................Grettir at Thorhall-stead

22. Lafcadio Hearn...............Yuki-Onna

23. F. Marion Crawford...........For the Blood Is the Life

24. Ambrose Bierce...............The Moonlit Road

25. Edward Lucas White...........Lukundoo

26. Olivia Howard Dunbar.........The Shell of Sense

27. Henry James..................The Jolly Corner

28. Alice Brown..................Golden Baby

29. Edith Wharton................Afterward

30. Willa Cather.................Consequences

31. Ellen Glasgow................The Shadowy Third

32. Julian Hawthorne.............Absolute Evil

33. Francis Stevens..............UnseenUnfeared

34. F. Scott Fitzgerald..........The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

35. Seabury Quinn................The Curse of Everard Maundy

36. Stephen Vincent Ben..........The King of the Cats

37. David H. Keller..............The Jelly-Fish

38. Conrad Aiken.................Mr. Arcularis

39. Robert E. Howard.............The Black Stone

40. Henry S. Whitehead...........Passing of a God

41. August Derleth...............The Panelled Room

42. H. P. Lovecraft..............The Thing on the Doorstep

43. Clark Ashton Smith...........Genius Loci

44. Robert Bloch.................The Cloak



Unabridged

Narrated By: Jim Zeiger

Duration: 34:52:12

Format: MP3

Bitrate: 64kbps





Volume 2: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now



The second volume of Peter Straubs pathbreaking two-volume 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 writersincluding Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury,

Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser, and Thomas Ligottihave

opened up the field to new subjects, new styles, and daringly fresh

expansions of the genres 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

Ellisons 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 Colliers Evening Primrose,

tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leibers Smoke Ghost,

the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams The

Mysteries of the Joy Riobecome invested with haunting presences. The

sphere of family life is transformed, in Davis Grubbs Where the Woodbine

Twineth or Richard Mathesons 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

Cheevers Torch Song and Shirley Jacksons 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.



1.  John Collier.................Evening Primrose

2.  Fritz Leiber.................Smoke Ghost

3.  Tennessee Williams...........The Mysteries of the Joy Rio

4.  Jane Rice....................The Refugee

5.  Anthony Boucher..............Mr. Lupescu

6.  Truman Capote................Miriam

7.  Jack Snow....................Midnight

8.  John Cheever.................Torch Song

9.  Shirley Jackson..............The Daemon Lover

10. Paul Bowles..................The Circular Valley

11. Jack Finney..................Im Scared

12. Vladimir Nabokov.............The Vane Sisters

13. Ray Bradbury.................The April Witch

14. Charles Beaumont.............Black Country

15. Jerome Bixby.................Trace

16. Davis Grubb..................Where the Woodbine Twineth

17. Donald Wandrei...............Nightmare

18. Harlan Ellison...............I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

19. Richard Matheson.............Prey

20. T.E.D. Klein.................The Events at Poroth Farm

21. Isaac Bashevis Singer........Hanka

22. Fred Chappell................Linnaeus Forgets

23. John Crowley.................Novelty

24. Jonathan Carroll.............Mr. Fiddlehead

25. Joyce Carol Oates............Family

26. Thomas Ligotti...............The Last Feast of Harlequin

27. Peter Straub.................A Short Guide to the City

28. Jeff VanderMeer..............The General Who Is Dead

29. Stephen King.................That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French

30. George Saunders..............Sea Oak

31. Caitl Kiernan................The Long Hall on the Top Floor

32. Thomas Tessier...............Nocturne

33. Michael Chabon...............The God of Dark Laughter

34. Joe Hill.....................Pop Art

35. Poppy Z. Brite...............Pansu

36. Steven Millhauser............Dangerous Laughter

37. M. Rickert...................The Chambered Fruit

38. Brian Evenson................The Wavering Knife

39. Kelly Link...................Stone Animals

40. Tim Powers...................Pat Moore

41. Gene Wolfe...................The Little Stranger

42. Benjamin Percy...............Dial Tone





Unabridged

Narrated By: Jim Zeiger

Duration: 32:58:35

Format: MP3

Bitrate: 64kbps