American horrors

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The tireless S.T. Joshi--whose very fine editions of M.R. James’ tales were published by Penguin over the past year--has edited ‘American Supernatural Tales’ (Penguin: 478 pp., $16 paper), an odd, satisfying collection that does what the best anthologies do--give us some favorites even as it rescues other names that might have been forgotten.

What makes a supernatural tale ‘American’? Not much, it seems. There doesn’t seem to be any specific national criteria at work here except that these stories are written by Americans and occur in this country. Aside from that, these stories, like all good creepers, are universal--speaking to our common dread of strangers, weird cats, phone calls in the middle of the night, fear of the dark and anything else that can unsettle us.

There are familiar selections like Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (pure gothic magnificence) and Henry James’ ‘The Real Right Thing’ (pure gothic agony to read him), and surprising ones like Charles Beaumont’s ‘The Vanishing American’ (his name may be familiar to you from Rod Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone,’ for which he wrote many episodes) and Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,’ a clear homage to H.P. Lovecraft (his ‘The Call of Cthulu’ is here too). Joshi also includes Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Demon’ as well as a short story by Stephen King, ‘Night Surf,’ which describes the strains on a small group of survivors after a viral plague has destroyed the human race.

I was sorry not to see Charles Brockden Brown represented; he’s one of the earliest American writers to proudly make a living solely from his pen. But Joshi’s rules for inclusion are strict, and Brockden Brown’s stories, he explains, give readers a situation ‘where the supernatural is suggested at the outset but ultimately explained away as the product of misconstrual or trickery.’ So, ok.

But I was also delighted by Joshi’s other choices, including T.E.D. Klein’s ‘The Events at Poroth Farm,’ in which a teacher stays at a farm in upstate New Jersey as he prepares a class on gothic literature. The character’s fevered journal entries end up reading like a brilliant ‘essay’ on European horror stories, as he plows through ‘Dracula,’ ‘Melmoth the Wanderer,’ ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ and much more while trying to make sense of the strange behavior of the felines that call the farm home. In the end, the mystery remains elusive, illustrating what the teacher-narrator complains about in Ann Radcliffe’s work: ‘Radcliffe’s unfortunate penchant for explaining away all her ghosts and apparitions really a mistake and a bore.’

So don’t explain anything, Joshi’s fine anthology tells us, just sit back and shiver.

Nick Owchar