[It’s been a couple of weeks since my last dispatch from the Macabre Republic, but it’s time to start posting again, and to resume the following feature…]

In this blog feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Tonight, I continue to work my way through the contents of Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“The Landscape Chamber” by Sarah Orne Jewett (1887)

When her horse is injured while she is on a solitary journey, the female narrator seeks refuge at a dreary and decrepit “colonial mansion” in rural New England: “everything gave evidence of unhindered decline from thrift and competence to poverty and ruin.” The “dismal place” is occupied by an “uncanny father and daughter”; the “weird old man” exhibits a peculiar miserliness, while the lonely daughter hints at “some miserable doom” that haunts their bloodline. Jewett sounds the time-honored American Gothic themes of family degeneracy and a dark past impinging upon the present. In the story’s climax, the old man speaks of an ancestor “who sold his soul for wealth”; “he was greedy for gain, and now we cannot part with what we have, even for common comfort. His children and his children’s children have suffered for his fault.” Matching her father’s “malady of unreason,” the daughter speculates that “we shall all disappear some night in a winter storm, and the world will be rid of us–father and the house and I, all three.” Strong echoes here of “The Fall of the House of Usher” (“The Landscape Chamber” concludes with the narrator readily fleeing the “house of shadows and strange moods”), even if Jewett is too genteel a writer to ever reach the same terrifying heights that Poe so masterfully mapped.

“The Story of a Day” by Grace King (1893)

A journey by skiff through the waters of the Louisiana bayou prompts the anonymous narrator to reminisce about Adorine Mérionaux, an old maid of twenty-five who suffered a “calamity” over a decade earlier. The young girl’s courtship by a neighboring beau ended in death rather than a wedding. Zepherin went missing, and his corpse wasn’t uncovered until the following summer (the “inference”–in this quiet and oblique tale–is that he drowned in the swamp while seeking out a late night rendezvous with Adorine). King’s sparse story (the narrator makes the disclaimer in the opening line that there is “not much” to it) works more as a tragic romance. Its most gothic moment involves the death throes (transpiring beneath “a ghostly moon”) of a heifer, “buried alive” in the “black ooze” of the swamp. All told, “The Story of a Day” makes for a curious inclusion in the anthology, as surely there were other, more representative works of “bayou gothic” that might have been chosen instead.

In this blog feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Tonight, I continue to work my way through the contents of Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“Old Homeplace” by Joshua Hiles (2019)

Hiles’s Faulknerian story (first published in this anthology) presents many recognizable elements of the American Gothic. There’s a decayed setting: a backwoods Missouri town reduced to “a ramshackle ruin” by flood and mud. There are primitive, clannish characters who seem out of step with the modern world. The sins of the fathers (and grandfathers and great-grandfathers…) loom large, thanks to an unending blood feud between two interrelated families. A sense of hereditary guilt reaches supernatural proportions, in the forms of strange ghosts (such as a beckoning, frog-head-chomping young girl) and a sinister black panther (believed by main character Elijah to be “our secrets and hates made flesh. I think it stalks us as retribution for those [past] crimes, and to punish anyone who sheds blood here in town.”). The climax feels a bit rushed, and all those family connections/transgressions can be confusing, but Hiles clearly knows how to create a strong sense of place and bathe it in creepy atmosphere.

The long overdue resumption of this blog feature, in which I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Tonight, I return to my exploration of Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“The Birthmark” (1843) by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Aylmer is “a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy.” He fixates on his beautiful and loving wife’s one ostensible flew: the titular blemish that marks her cheek in the shape of a tiny red hand. He seizes on the birthmark as “the symbol of his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death,” and his uncontrollable repulsion also instills a deep sense of self-loathing in Georgiana. When he labors to remove the birthmark (with the aid of a grotesque assistant who prefigures many an Igor), Aylmer ends up having a devastating effect on his wife’s well-being. The lab-adjacent apartment in which Georgiana is kept during the time of the various procedures suggests a typical Gothic space of female entrapment, and Aylmer is the quintessential mad experimenter, falling within a long line of dangerously overreaching doctors such as Frankenstein, Jekyll, and Moreau. But there is a vagary of setting here (the tale might be set anywhere, in Europe as easily as America), that limits the sense of the American Gothic and thus makes for a curious inclusion (given the existence of so many other more representative works by the author) in this anthology.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) by Nathaniel Hawthorne

By contrast, this story evinces a distinctly American setting: the New England village of Milford. Here the resident parson, Hooper, has taken to wearing the eponymous crape draping, which makes him a figure of dreadful fascination to the community. Is his strange facial covering just an “eccentric whim” or part of some solemn moral lesson to his congregation? For the rest of his earthly life, Hooper (who refuses to lift the veil even in the privacy of his home) is “shrouded in dismal suspicions” and shunned by the superstitious villagers. But he finally turns the tables, so to speak, via his parting barb to those gathered around his deathbed:

“Why do you tremble at me alone?” cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. “Tremble also at each other. Have men avoided me and women showed me no pity and children screamed and fled only for my black veil? What but the mystery which it obscurely typifies has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin–then deem me a monster for the symbol beneath which I live and die. I look around me, and , lo! on every visage a black veil!

With its central image of masking and its thematic concerns with secret sin and ostracism of the perceived-monstrous Other, “The Minister’s Black Veil” is a strong work of American Gothic short fiction, and forms a leading example of Hawthorne’s critical engagement with the legacy of New England Puritanism.

In this recurring feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Today, I continue my exploration of Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“The Past” by Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow’s 1920 tale establishes its Gothic mood and setting from the get-go: “I had no sooner entered the house,” the narrative begins, “than I knew something was wrong. Though I had never been in so splendid a place before–it was one of those big houses just off Fifth Avenue–I had a suspicion from the first that the magnificence covered a secret disturbance.” There is “a tragic mystery in the house”; “a nameless dread, fear, or apprehension” seems to divide the married couple, the Vanderbridges, residing there.The “horror” permeating the house is eventually revealed to be the ghost of Mr. Vanderbridge’s first wife, fifteen years deceased but still vibrant with “jealous rage.” As if all this wasn’t Gothic enough, the plot of “The Past” turns on the discovery of a secret compartment in a desk containing hidden letters.

The story reads like a miniaturized/Americanized version of Henry James’s classic novel, The Turn of the Screw. The not-quite-reliable (yet not necessarily crazy) narrator, Miss Wrenn, isn’t a governess in this case, but rather “the new secretary.” While she confides with the maid (cf. the governess’s interactions with Mrs. Grose in The Turn of the Screw), it is ultimately up to Miss Wren to “stand between [the current Mrs. Vanderbridge] and harm.” Much of the tale (much like James’s novel) hinges on the question of who actually sees the ghost.

Perhaps the strongest Gothic element, though, is signaled by the story’s title: the past that is not dead and buried, but an unquiet and overbearing influence on the present. The narrator writes of Mr. Vanderbridge (whose guilt over his first wife’s death apparently animates her vengeful spirit): “The past was with him so constantly–he was so steeped in the memories of it–that the present was scarcely more than a dream to him.” Miss Wrenn makes the point even more definitively when she later states that the Vanderbridges’ is “a haunted house–a house pervaded by an unforgettable past.”

At this point, I am only about a third of the way through the table of contents, but I believe I will hard-pressed to find a more representative piece in this anthology of American Gothic Short Stories.

In this recurring feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Today, I focus on a signature piece in Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gilman’s popular 1892 tale is stocked with Gothic conventions. First, the story emphasizes its own textuality: the narrative is presented as the narrator’s private (and secret, since she has been discouraged from writing) journal. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is set in the typical American alternative to the English Gothic castle: “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic feilicity,” the narrator writes at the outset of the ancestral hall that has been leased by her physician husband as a place for the bride and new mother to rest and recover from her “temporary nervous depression–a slight hysterical tendency.” Gilman also invokes notions of the dark double, as the narrator identifies with, and blurs the distinction from, the female figures perceived trapped behind the titular wallpaper (“I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did?”). Furthermore, the narrator’s husband John fits the mold of the Gothic hero-villain, as a certain danger underlies his affection for his wife. At best, he is a physician of dubious merit, a doctor whose prescribed treatment proves worse than the diagnosed illness; at worst, he is suspiciously duplicitous (this allegedly loving and concerned husband does spend a lot of time away from home, kept in town overnight by his “serious cases”).

In the best Gothic tradition, “The Yellow Wallpaper” presents readers with a quintessentially unreliable narrator. The protagonist’s perceptions grow more and more suspect as the story unfolds, and her plans of actions veer toward irrationality (such as when she “thought seriously of burning the house–to reach the [yellow] smell” seemingly pervading it). On a surface level, the narrator’s words don’t inspire much confidence, but they are also quite revealing. The aged wallpaper “has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade,” and the same can be said of the “dead paper” upon which the narrator records her thoughts. The subtle “contradictions” detected in the wallpaper’s pattern are reflected in the very lines of the narrative. “He is very careful and loving,” the narrator writes of her husband, “and hardly lets me stir without special direction,” and the astute reader senses how the second half of the sentence qualifies the first. Like the wallpaper woman shaking the bars of her cage, Gilman’s story sounds a feminist critique of patriarchal society and its overbearing, misguided authorities (on a biographical level, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is Gilman’s pointed response to her own experience of Dr. Weir Mitchell’s regiment for alleged hysterics). Surely it is no throwaway detail that the “Fourth of July” is referenced in the middle of the story; while the nation can celebrate its freedom, American women of that time period could boast no similar achievement in the domestic sphere.

Finally, Gilman’s tale is a masterpiece of unsettling ambiguity. Does the narrator’s steady slide into madness validate her doctor-husband’s original diagnosis? Or is this a case of a woman unfortunately caught in the wrong place at the wrong time of her life and driven to madness? Denied “society and stimulus,” did this creatively-stifled female inevitably divert her considerable “imaginative power and habit of story-making” onto her confining environs? The feminist subtext here, however, should not blind us to what an undeniably creepy story Gilman has penned. The various descriptions of the wallpaper (e.g., “the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down”; “the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase”; “an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions”) are unforgettably eldritch. The reader cannot simply discount the supernatural element (especially if the narrator’s claim that her husband and sister-in-law have also been “secretly affected by” the wallpaper is accepted). All the bizarre behavior manifested by the narrator at story’s end (stripping away the wallpaper, gnawing on the bedpost, aligning her shoulder with “that long smooch around the wall”) could be interpreted as recurrences of previous incidents, as the narrator becomes the latest victim claimed by a haunted room.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a central work in the history of Gothic literature, looking back to Charlotte Bronte (the madwoman-in-the-attic motif of Jane Eyre) and Edgar Allan Poe (whose narrators repeatedly grow obsessed to the point of madness) while also pointing ahead to the psychology-complex ghost stories of Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House). A classic tale that continues to resonate well over a century later, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has etched its place on the Mount Rushmore of all-time-great American Gothic short stories.

In this recurring feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Today, I return to Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“Singed Moths” by Emma Dawson

This 1896 tale reflects the overtly textual quality of the Gothic: the narrative is comprised mainly of the diary entries of three sisters. Katherine, Charlotte, and Elizabeth have fallen on hard times financially, but their fortunes seem to improve when a stranger shows up on their doorstep to let a room from them. Mr. Orne fits the mold of the Gothic hero-villain, seducing each sister with his gentlemanly charms that hide a more diabolical agenda (Dawson’s story might remind the modern reader of The Witches of Eastwick). The women of the house–all save the gossiping landlady Biddy–remain blind to Orne’s sinister threat, and the lovestruck sisters meet a dire fate on Allhallows Eve. This particular date, though, has nothing to do with the popular American holiday Halloween (which did not even exist yet), and draws its ominous significance from Old World superstition. While the story tours the San Francisco art scene, the cultural references (e.g. Faust) are predominantly European, limiting the sense of “Singed Moths” as an especially American Gothic piece.

“Graveyards Full” by Maxx Fidalgo

An anti-Catholic sensibility in Gothic literature is as old as the genre itself, and continues in this 2019 story (original to the anthology). The protagonist Teresa struggles to find anyone in the Church willing to help lay her deceased wife Kira’s soul to rest: “A married lesbian couple joining the parish? No problem. One of them committing suicide and the surviving partner asking for the priest to preside over her funeral?” Forget it. The hypocrisy and biases of the Church are further emphasized when Teresa meets up with a sin eater. This man, Duarte, had previously been kicked out of seminary school; the Church held that his sin eating ability did not align with its practices, but Duarte understands that the real reason for his dismissal is his transgender status. “Graveyards Full” is the author’s first story publication, but in it Fidalgo demonstrates a clear awareness that an American Gothic narrative does not have to devolve into horror. The action takes place mainly in a remote, run-down Massachusetts cemetery on “an eerie autumn day,” but the atmosphere and setting don’t work towards sinister effect. When Duarte performs the ritual, Teresa senses “an unmistakable inhuman energy around them, and it is not evil, but it is powerful.” The sin eating is a success, cleansing the stain from the suicide Kira’s soul, leaving Teresa thankful and at peace herself. Emphasizing salvation (achieved by moving beyond the strictures of the Catholic Church) over damnation, the story ultimately gives a positive spin to its religious themes.

In this recurring feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Today, I delve back into Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“The Dark Presser” by E.E.W. Christman

In Christman’s 2019 story (original to the volume), protagonist Margo is haunted by a “monstrous shadow creature” in her nightmares–and seemingly also in her waking life. Such persistent terrorizing turns her surroundings uncanny, unfamiliar and strange (the very first line of the piece reads: “There’s something wrong with my house”). Jason, Margo’s eager-to-help neighbor who harbors a sinister secret, clearly fits the Gothic hero-villain mold. But the sense of place here is vague: the setting could be anywhere, and not necessarily even in the U.S. “The Dark Presser”  is a traditional horror tale, yet not one that is distinctly American Gothic.

“The Dead Valley” by Ralph Adams Cram

Cram’s 1895 story elicits chills from the wilderness, presenting a scene of nature haunted by the supernatural. A mountainside black forest is unnervingly quiet, with not a bird or insect to be heard. The air is oppressively stagnant: “The atmosphere seemed to lie upon the body like the weight of sea on a diver who has ventured too far into its awful depths.” The epicenter of terribleness, though, is the titular stretch of land covered (only after dark) by a “sea of dead white mist”–“so ominous was it, so utterly unreal, so phantasmal, so impossible, as it lay there like a dead ocean under the steady stars.” Looming up from this valley is a “great dead tree” ringed by “a wilderness of little bones”:

Tiny skulls of rodents and of birds, thousands of them, rising about the dead tree and streaming off for several yards in all directions, until the dreadful pile ended in isolated skulls and scattered skeletons. Here and there a larger bone appeared–the thigh of a sheep, the hoofs of a horse, and to one side, grinning slowly, a human skull.

Such frightful errand into the wilderness might make for a quintessential American Gothic narrative except for one key fact: the protagonist, Olaf Ehrensvard, is relating an incident that happened during his childhood back in Sweden! A considerably creepy variant on a ghost story, “The Dead Valley” thus qualifies as American Gothic only in the facile sense that it is a Gothic tale written by an American.

A final aside: the biographical end note points out that Cram was not just an author but “also one of the foremost architects of the Gothic revival in the United States. His influence helped to establish Gothic as the standard style of the period for American college and university buildings.” No doubt Cram was an astute student of (American) Gothic form; one only wishes that a more representative composition was chosen for this anthology.

In this recurring feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Today, I delve back into Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“Stone Baby” by Terri Bruce

This is the first original story to appear in the anthology’s pages, but it suggests a classic American Gothic lineage. Bruce’s work here is reminiscent of the dark fables of Shirley Jackson, as something uncanny unfolds from the blanketing banality of married life. Echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” might also be discerned, as a woman is plagued by an overbearing and obtuse husband, and is seemingly unhinged by grief. The protagonist Lynne learns that she was unwittingly pregnant and suffered a form of miscarriage that resulted in a “lithopedion”: the stone baby of the title that “had stayed inside her. Stayed inside her and calcified–the body’s defense mechanism against blood poisoning.” Matters grow even weirder when the thing–declared dead by medical science–begins to kick, and Lynne senses the presence of shadowy winged figures at her bedside encouraging her to bring the stone baby to term. The revelation of the final line isn’t all that shocking by the time it arrives, but it does give a wicked twist to the notion of extramarital affair.

“The Tomb-Herd” by Ramsey Campbell

Britain’s greatest living horror writer is best known for narratives with predominantly English urban or rural settings, but this early tale (written when Campbell was just fifteen, yet not published until 1986) displays the overarching influence of American writer H.P. Lovecraft. Campbell somehow manages to pack seemingly all of the Cthulhu Mythos into a few pages of story, naming the various “alien gods” from Lovecraft’s unpronounceable pantheon. The pastiche is so earnest here that Campbell even replicates Lovecraft’s narrative flaws (strings of anxious adjectives–“rolling, plopping, surging monstrously”; characters who sit and continue to write, describing the unspeakable horror currently bearing down on them). Campbell, though, also captures the elements of American Gothic that infuse Lovecraft’s weird fiction. The ill-reputed town of Kingsport, Massachusetts, is approached through “grim, brooding country, sparse of habitation and densely wooded.” There’s a shunned house, shuttered and ivy-strangled, and haunted by nothing so prosaic as a ghost but instead slimy white monstrosities “with lich-like eyes.”  A deserted church in the center of town has been converted into a place of profane worship and sinister rites. Perhaps the most nightmarish aspect of Campbell’s version of Kingston is the way the roads supernaturally circle back toward the church and prevent the escape of spooked humans. The idea of a dead-end town is given terrible new meaning, as anyone unlucky enough to encounter the eponymous necrophagous ghouls ends up suffering a fate infinitely worse than death.

In this recurring feature, I explore the contents of anthologies of American Gothic literature (as explicitly identified by book title), considering the extent to which the selections exemplify the genre. Today, I return to Flame Tree Publishing’s 2019 volume American Gothic Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce

At the start of this classic 1890 tale, main character Peyton Farquhar, an “original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause,” stands on the verge of execution by Union forces after being tricked by a Federal scout into declaring intentions of sabotage. This scene of imminent demise allows Bierce to critique the inhumane nature of the Civil War: “Evidently this was no vulgar assassin,” the narrative states. “The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.” The Gothic quality of the story is also accented by the fact that Edgar Allan Poe’s influence is writ large here. Vivid description of the physical experience of hanging from Farquhar’s own perspective recalls a Poe “tale of sensation” such as “A Predicament.” The hypersensitivity of Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is echoed by Farquhar’s “preternaturally keen and alert [physical senses]. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived.” A nod towards Poe’s “A Descent into Maelstrom” can even be detected when Farquhar plunges into the river below the bridge and finds himself “caught in a vortex.”

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” remains famous to this day for its twist ending–the final-line revelation that Farquhar never actually escaped execution. Less appreciated, though, are the haunting paragraphs just preceding this conclusion, which describe the sinister, uncanny landscape Farquhar traverses in his fugitive flight back home towards his family:

At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in the lesson of perspective.  Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which–once, twice, and again–he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.

The Civil War has furnished material for countless works of American Gothic fiction, but none better than this early example from Bierce.

“A Vine on a House” by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce sets this brief 1905 story firmly in Gothic territory, focusing on “a rather picturesque ruin” in Norton, Missouri, that is regarded as a haunted house with an “evil reputation. Its windows are without glass, its doorways without doors; there are wide breaches in the shingle roof, and for lack of paint the weatherboarding is a dun gray.”  Misgivings about this deserted and decrepit domicile no doubt trace back to the time when it was still fit for habitation: the previous occupants “were rather tabooed by their neighbors” for defying the “moral code of rural Missouri.” Robert Harding was “seen too frequently together” with his sister-in-law Julia Went instead of in the company of his wife Matilda, “a gentle, sad-eyed woman lacking a left foot.”

In 1884, when Matilda fails to be seen on the premises, Robert claims that his wife has gone to Iowa to visit her mother. But Matilda “never came back, and two years later, without selling his farm or anything that was his, or appointing an agent to look after his interests, or removing his household goods, Harding, with the rest of the family, left the country.” About five years after this, a pair of travelers stop to rest on the porch of the house, but their conversation is cut short when the vine growing up the front of the house at once grows “visibly and audibly agitated, shaking violently in every stem and leaf.” More locals are drawn to observe this “mysterious phenomenon,” and finally they all decide to get to the bottom of the “manifestations” by digging up the vine. Doing so, they discover that the rootlets in the earth have woven themselves into a shape with “an amazing resemblance to the human figure.” There is “a grotesque suggestion of a face,” but the most telling detail is that the “figure lacked the left foot.”

A dark deed seemingly has been brought to light by supernatural means. The replanted vine thereafter remains “orderly and well-behaved,” but the house deservedly “retains its evil reputation.” If American Gothic is concerned with the horrors hidden behind closed doors and shaded windows, then Bierce’s tale of adultery and murder certainly proves a representative piece.