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American Gothic Tales Spiral-Bound | December 1, 1996

Joyce Carol Oates (Edited by), Various

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This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers.

Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the “gothic” in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. 

In showing us the gothic vision—a world askew where mankind’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless—Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Herman Melville’s horrific tale of factory women, “The Tartarus of Maids,” and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time.

Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer’s subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates’s superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn’t create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.

Publisher: Penguin Random House
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 560 pages
ISBN-10: 0452274893
Item Weight: 1.3 lbs
Dimensions: 6.0 x 1.2 x 9.0 inches
“In compiling 40 short stories that represent the 200-year history of ‘gothic’ fiction in America, from Washington Irving's classic The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to Stephen King's The Reach, Oates employs an eclectic and elastic definition of the genre… Oates's taste in the quality of stories is always impeccable. The pieces also all share a certain darkness. Entries range from Edgar Allen Poe's sadistic The Black Cat to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic psychological horror story The Yellow Wallpaper. Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice and Katherine Dunn are also represented. Among the more idiosyncratic selections are Herman Melville's The Tartarus of Maids; Don DeLillo's beautiful tale of astronauts floating above the earth in Human Moments in World War III; and Paul Bowles's strange and powerful Allal, about a Moroccan orphan boy who so identifies with a snake that they mysteriously change bodies-and meet gory fates.”—Publishers Weekly
In addition to many prize-winning and bestselling novels, including We Were the Mulvaneys, Black Water, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, and Broke Heart Blues, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of gothic fiction including Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, a World Fantasy Award nominee; and Zombie, winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, awarded by the Horror Writers' Association. In 1994, Oates received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction. She is the editor of American Gothic Tales. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.