American Gothic Tales

American Gothic Tales is an anthology of "gothic" American short fiction. Edited and with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, it was published by Plume in 1996. It featured contributions by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice and others, and included over 40 stories.

Introduction

Excerpt from introduction: "My original intention in assembling American Gothic Tales was to provide an historic overview of "gothicism" in our literature and, of course, to bring together favorite, distinctive stories. As the months passed and I immersed myself in reading, particularly in the burgeoning contemporary field, I discovered that frank eroticism and female-male relations are no longer taboo in gothic tales (see Lisa Tuttle's ominous "Replacements" and Kathe Koja's and Barry N. Malzberg's lyrically sadomasochistic "Ursus Triad, Later"); and that an older classic like Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" has acquired, in our age of children's and adolescents' video games, a terrifying prescience..."

Charles Brockden Brown - Wieland; or, the Transformation

Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Man of Adamant, Young Goodman Brown

Herman Melville - The Tartarus of Maids
-- A paradox of a heaven, Paradise, and a hell, Tartarus, hidden in a valley called "Devil's Dungeon".

Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
-- Gouging Pluto's eye out with a pen-knife, this was the beginning of the end!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper

Henry James - The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

Ambrose Bierce - That Damned Thing
-- "....there are things in the natural world the human eye cannot see or the human ear could hear."

Edith Wharton - Afterward
-- "You won't know till long, long afterward."

Gertrude Atherton - The Striding Place
-- "...A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy..."

Sherwood Anderson - Death in the Woods

H. P. Lovecraft - The Outsider