Anyone who’s picked up an anthology in recent years is bound to find a story from the ridiculously prolific Joyce Carol Oates in there; she excels at the format. And as an anthologist, she ain’t bad, either, judging from AMERICAN GOTHIC TALES.
A brick of a book, this collection of TALES examines the path of Gothic fiction through 46 stories spanning 200 years. It attempts to draw a direct line from the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the likes of Stephen King, and I think it succeeds. It begins with established classics like Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” working its way up through Henry James, Ambrose Bierce and the ghost stories of Edith Wharton.
The next generation includes H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson (though not, as would would expect, “The Lottery”), while the new crowd is represented by Anne Rice, Peter Straub and Oates herself. It’s not surprising that you would find such luminaries in a book like this. What is surprising, however, is finding names you wouldn’t normally associate with Gothic or horror literature: Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, E.B. White and William Faulkner, to name a few.
With the exception of Ursula Le Guin’s “Schrödinger’s Cat,” there are no “finds” in AMERICAN GOTHIC TALES, but it’s awfully nice to have so many classic stories in one volume.
Related posts:
- 999: Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense
- The Colour out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror
- The Museum of Horrors
- The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time
- The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales
