American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny ( Edited by Peter Straub )

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny
Edited by Peter Straub
Read by Jim Zieger
Encode: mp3 - 96kbps, 1 channel, 44.1 KHz
Total # of Tracks: 92
Total Play time: 68:02:2


1. American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps



Publisher's Summary
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.

01) Introduction by Peter Straub
02) Somnambulism: A Fragment by Charles Brockden Brown
03) The Adventure of the German Student by Washington Irving
04) Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe
05) Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
06) The Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville
07) What Was It? A Mystery by Fitz-James O'Brien
08) The Legend of Monte del Diablo by Bret Harte
09) The Moonstone Mass by Harriet Prescott Spofford
10) His Unconquerable Enemy by W. C. Morrow
11) In Dark New England Days by Sarah Orne Jewett
12) The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
13) The Black Dog by Stephen Crane
14) Ma'ame Pélagie by Kate Chopin
15) Thurlow's Christmas Story by John Kendrick Bangs
16) The Repairer of Reputations by Robert W. Chambers
17) The Dead Valley by Ralph Adams Cram
18) The Little Room by Madeline Yale Wynne
19) The Striding Place by Gertrude Atherton
20) An Itinerant House by Emma Frances Dawson
21) Luella Miller by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
22) Grettir at Thorhall-stead by Frank Norris
23) Yuki-Onna by Lafcadio Hearn
24) For the Blood Is the Life by F. Marion Crawford
25) The Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce
26) Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White
27) The Shell of Sense by Olivia Howard Dunbar
28) The Jolly Corner by Henry James
29) Golden Baby by Alice Brown
30) Afterward by Edith Wharton
31) Consequences by Willa Cather
32) The Shadowy Third by Ellen Glasgow
33) Absolute Evil by Julian Hawthorne
34) Unseen—Unfeared by Francis Stevens
35) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald
36) The Curse of Everard Maundy by Seabury Quinn
37) The King of the Cats by Stephen Vincent Benét
38) The Jelly-Fish by David H. Keller, M.D.
39) Mr. Arcularis by Conrad Aiken
40) The Black Stone by Robert E. Howard
41) Passing of a God by Henry S. Whitehead
42) The Panelled Room by August Derleth
43) The Thing on the Doorstep by H. P. Lovecraft
44) Genius Loci by Clark Ashton Smith
45) The Cloak by Robert Bloch
46) Biographical Notes by uncredited
47) Note on the Texts by uncredited

2. American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now




Publisher's Summary
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.

01) Introduction by Peter Straub
02) Evening Primrose by John Collier
03) Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber
04) The Mysteries of the Joy Rio by Tennessee Williams
05) The Refugee by Jane Rice
06) Mr. Lupescu by Anthony Boucher
07) Miriam by Truman Capote
08) Midnight by Jack Snow
09) Torch Song by John Cheever
10) The Daemon Lover by Shirley Jackson
11) The Circular Valley by Paul Bowles
12) I'm Scared by Jack Finney
13) The Vane Sisters by Vladimir Nabokov
14) The April Witch by Ray Bradbury
15) Black Country by Charles Beaumont
16) Trace by Jerome Bixby
17) Where the Woodbine Twineth by Davis Grubb
18) Nightmare by Donald Wandrei
19) I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
20) Prey by Richard Matheson
21) The Events at Poroth Farm by T. E. D. Klein
22) Hanka by Isaac Bashevis Singer
23) Linnaeus Forgets by Fred Chappell
24) Novelty by John Crowley
25) Mr. Fiddlehead by Jonathan Carroll
26) Family by Joyce Carol Oates
27) The Last Feast of Harlequin by Thomas Ligotti
28) A Short Guide to the City by Peter Straub
29) The General Who Is Dead by Jeff VanderMeer
30) That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French by Stephen King
31) Sea Oak by George Saunders
32) The Long Hall on the Top Floor by Caitlín R. Kiernan
33) Nocturne by Thomas Tessier
34) The God of Dark Laughter by Michael Chabon
35) Pop Art by Joe Hill
36) Pansu by Poppy Z. Brite
37) Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
38) The Chambered Fruit by M. Rickert
39) The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson
40) Stone Animals by Kelly Link
41) Pat Moore by Tim Powers
42) The Little Stranger by Gene Wolfe
43) Dial Tone by Benjamin Percy
44) Biographical Notes by uncredited
45) Note on the Texts by uncredited