American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940’s to Now (Library of America Fantastic Tales Collection)

The second volume of Peter Straubs pathbreaking two-volume 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 writersincluding Shirley Jackson Ray Bradbury Charles Beaumont Stephen King Steven Millhauser and Thomas Ligottihave opened up the field to new subjects new styles and daringly fresh expansions of the genres 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 Ellisons 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 lifedepartment store displays in John Colliers Evening Primrose tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leibers Smoke Ghost the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams The Mysteries of the Joy Riobecome invested with haunting presences. The sphere of family life is transformed in Davis Grubbs Where the Woodbine Twineth or Richard Mathesons 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 Cheevers Torch Song and Shirley Jacksons 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 forty-two stories in this second volume of American Fantastic Tales provide an irresistible journey into the phantasmagoric underside of the American imagination. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date authoritative editions that average 1 000 pages in length feature cloth covers sewn bindings and ribbon markers and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.