Volume 1: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

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.

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

Unabridged
Narrated By: Jim Zeiger
Duration: 34:52:12
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64kbps


Volume 2: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

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
life department 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.

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. Caitl 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


Unabridged
Narrated By: Jim Zeiger
Duration: 32:58:35
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64kbps