| 9781681775296 |
| 1681775298 |
Available:*
Library | Material Type | Call Number | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Penrose Library | Book | COLO | Fiction | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
The most spine-tingling suspense stories from the colonial era--including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft--are presented anew to the contemporary reader.
This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the Colonial era's stifling religion and its dark and threatening woods.
Today the best-known tale of Colonial horror is Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," although Irving's story is probably best-known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors--Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them--are overshadowed by their bestsellers and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today's reading public.
Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary reader, the book will help bring their names--and their work--back from the dead.
Featuring stories by Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and many more.
Author Notes
Graeme Davis has been fascinated by horror fiction since his teens, devouring late-night reruns of the classic Universal and Hammer movies on his parents' black-and-white TV and stripping local thrift-stores of horror titles. He began writing for tabletop role-playing games in the early 1980s, and among many other credits he helped develop Games Workshop's blockbuster Warhammer dark-fantasy franchise and the 90s Gothic hit Vampire: The Masquerade , as well as more than 40 electronic games. This is his second anthology for Pegasus, following on from the 2017 collection Colonial Horrors . He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
Full of witch trials, unfamiliar woods, and threatening natives, the American colonial period seems the perfect point for the creation of American horror. Davis pulls together a well-curated collection of creepy, spooky, and downright weird pieces by a core group of American authors. The standards are there: Edgar Allan Poe (his lesser-known A Tale of the Ragged Mountains), Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, and Henry James. Davis also includes children's author and illustrator Howard Pyle's The Salem Wolf, which places a werewolf attack at the height of the witch panic, and a chapter from John Neal's Rachel Dyer, which imagines just how that witch panic came to be. Maybe the most interesting pieces are newspaper articles detailing events that would become local folklore, including the New Jersey Devil (In the Pines) and the source of the Blair Witch phenomenon (An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch). As the nights grow cooler and the shadows longer, stoke the fire and curl up with this excellent example of true American horror.--Ciesla, Carolyn Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
The literature of the uncanny and weird, despite periodic critical disregard, is deeply rooted in American history and culture. Popular novelists such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Straub are on record citing the influence of the pioneers of American supernatural fiction. Editor Davis, who was the line editor for Colonial Gothic, Rogue Games's conspiracy-horror game set in early America, has gathered 17 selections, published between 1684 and 1927 and featuring authors (from both the colonial era and later) of widely disparate visions-among them Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and even Cotton Mather, supporter of the 1692 Salem witch trials. Unsurprisingly, much short fiction and novels of the colonial period bear indelible traces of Puritanism. What distinguishes this anthology from others is the historical contextualization given to each tale. European settlers, confronted by vast forests and indigeneous peoples, viewed anything remotely unknown or "spiritual" as pagan-hence evil. This mind-set and its demonization of wild nature resulted in horrors, both historical and literary. VERDICT For lovers of American literature and horror fiction fans, this important anthology reveals how the religious beliefs, historical events, and folktales of the colonial period influenced the writerly imaginations that led to the evolution of the modern horror genre.-William Grabowski, McMechen, WV © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | p. 1 |
| An Essay for the Recording of Remarkable Providences by Increase Mather | p. 31 |
| Wonders of the Invisible World | p. 49 |
| Lithobolia | p. 61 |
| Wieland | p. 79 |
| The Money-Diggers | p. 93 |
| Rachel Dyer | p. 161 |
| Moll Pitcher | p. 173 |
| The Birth-Mark | p. 197 |
| A Tale of the Ragged Mountains | p. 215 |
| The Lake Gun | p. 227 |
| In the Pines | p. 239 |
| The Romance of Certain Old Clothes | p. 255 |
| An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch | p. 275 |
| Myths and Legends of Our Own Land | p. 319 |
| The Salem Wolf | p. 335 |
| The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | p. 349 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 381 |
