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American Fantastic Tales
Peter Straub
Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
Library of America
October 2009
On Sale: October 1, 2009
750 pages ISBN: 1598530488 EAN: 9781598530483 Hardcover
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Horror
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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