American Gothic Tales - Joyce Carol Oates

[jonathan122]

American Gothic Tales - ed. Joyce Carol Oates (1996, Plume)

Wieland, or The Transformation (extract) - Charles Brockden Brown
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
The Man of Adamant - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Tartarus of Maids - Herman Melville
The Black Cat - Edgar Allan Poe
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes - Henry James
The Damned Thing - Ambrose Bierce
Afterward - Edith Wharton
The Striding Place - Gertrude Atherton
Death in the Woods - Sherwood Anderson
The Outsider - H. P. Lovecraft
A Rose for Emily - William Faulkner
The Lonesome Place - August Derleth
The Door - E. B. White
The Lovely House (A Visit) - Shirley Jackson
Allal - Paul Bowles
The Reencounter - Isaac Bashevis Singer
In the Icebound Hothouse - William Goyen
The Enormous Radio - John Cheever
The Veldt - Ray Bradbury
The Dachau Shoe - W. S. Merwin
The Approved - W. S. Merwin
Spiders I Have Known - W. S. Merwin
Postcards from the Maginot Line - W. S. Merwin
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams - Sylvia Plath
In Bed One Night - Robert Coover
Schrodinger's Cat - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Waterworks - E. L. Doctorow
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin - Harlan Ellison
Human Moments in World War III - Don DeLillo
The Anatomy of Desire - John L'Heureux
Little Things - Raymond Carver
The Temple - Joyce Carol Oates
Freniere (from Interview with the Vampire) - Anne Rice
A Short Guide to the City - Peter Straub
In the Penny Arcade - Steven Millhauser
The Reach - Stephen King
Exchange Value - Charles Johnson
Snow - John Crowley
The Last Feast of Harlequin - Thomas Ligotti
Time and Again - Breece D'J Pancake
Replacements - Lisa Tuttle
Spirit Seizures - Melissa Pritchard
Cat in Glass - Nancy Etchemendy
The Girl Who Loved Animals - Bruce McAllister
Ursus Triad, Later - Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth (from Geek Love) - Katherine Dunn
Subsoil - Nicholson Baker

Given who's editing it, it's probably not surprising that this book focuses mainly on the more "literary" end of the spectrum, but it's all been a bit of a slog at the moment. Poe's "The Black Cat" actually come as a bit of a relief - using gothic tropes as a metaphor for loss and our inability to communicate with each other is all well and good, but sometimes you just want to read about a man gouging a cat's eyeballs out.

[andydecker]

Joyce Carol Oates (ed.) - American Gothic Tales (Plume/Penguin, 1996, 544 pages)

Cover: Albert Pinkham Ryder
Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

It is an impressive collection, as could be expected by Oates, whose genre work is always interesting. It appears to be without prejudices, where else do you see August Derleth side by side with Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sylvia Plath. But the contemporary entries seem to be a bit random.