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At its core, writes editor Peter Straub, the fantastic is a way of seeing. 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. 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 42 stories in this second volume of American Fantastic Tales provide an irresistible journey into the phantasmagoric underside of the American imagination.
Unabridged.
Read By Jim Zeiger.
Contains
1. John Collier – Evening Primrose
2. Fritz Leiber – Smoke Ghost
3. Tennessee Williams – The Mysteries of the Joy Rio
4. Jane Rice – The Refugee
5. Anthony Boucher – Mr. Lupescu
6. Truman Capote – Miriam
7. Jack Snow – Midnight
8. John Cheever – Torch Song
9. Shirley Jackson – The Daemon Lover
10. Paul Bowles – The Circular Valley
11. Jack Finney – Im Scared
12. Vladimir Nabokov – The Vane Sisters
13. Ray Bradbury – The April Witch
14. Charles Beaumont – Black Country
15. Jerome Bixby – Trace
16. Davis Grubb – Where the Woodbine Twineth
17. Donald Wandrei – Nightmare
18. Harlan Ellison – I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
19. Richard Matheson – Prey
20. T.E.D. Klein – The Events at Poroth Farm
21. Isaac Bashevis Singer – Hanka
22. Fred Chappell – Linnaeus Forgets
23. John Crowley – Novelty
24. Jonathan Carroll Mr. Fiddlehead
25. Joyce Carol Oates – Family
26. Thomas Ligotti – The Last Feast of Harlequin
27. Peter Straub – A Short Guide to the City
28. Jeff VanderMeer – The General Who Is Dead
29. Stephen King – That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French-
30. George Saunders – Sea Oak
31. Caitlín Kiernan – The Long Hall on the Top Floor
32. Thomas Tessier – Nocturne
33. Michael Chabon – The God of Dark Laughter
34. Joe Hill – Pop Art
35. Poppy Z. Brite – Pansu
36. Steven Millhauser – Dangerous Laughter
37. M. Rickert – The Chambered Fruit
38. Brian Evenson – The Wavering Knife
39. Kelly Link – Stone Animals
40. Tim Powers – Pat Moore
41. Gene Wolfe – The Little Stranger
42. Benjamin Percy – Dial Tone
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