Read By: Jim Zeiger

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.

Download File Size:2.67 GB

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