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Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the "gothic" in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers.

In showing us the gothic vision--a world askew where mankind's forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless--Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James's "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," Herman Melville's horrific tale of factory women, "The Tartarus of Maids," and Edith Wharton's "Afterward," which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time.

Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer's subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates's superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn't create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1996) - essay by Joyce Carol Oates
• From Wieland, or The Transformation (excerpt) - (1798) - shortfiction by Charles Brockden Brown
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - (1819) - novelette by Washington Irving
• The Man of Adamant - (1837) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Tartarus of Maids - (1855) - shortstory by Herman Melville
• Young Goodman Brown - (1835) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Black Cat - (1843) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Yellow Wallpaper - (1892) - novelette by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Romance of Certain Old Clothes - (1868) - shortstory by Henry James
• The Damned Thing - (1893) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• Afterward - (1910) - novelette by Edith Wharton
• The Striding Place - (1896) - shortstory by Gertrude Atherton
• Death in the Woods - (1926) - shortstory by Sherwood Anderson
• The Outsider - (1926) - shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
• A Rose for Emily - (1930) - shortstory by William Faulkner
• The Lonesome Place - (1941) - shortstory by August Derleth
• The Door - (1939) - shortstory by E. B. White
• The Lovely House - (1952) - novelette by Shirley Jackson
• Allal - (1977) - shortstory by Paul Bowles
• The Reencounter - (1982) - shortstory by Isaac Bashevis Singer
• In the Icebound Hothouse - (1985) - shortstory by William Goyen
• The Enormous Radio - (1947) - shortstory by John Cheever
• The Veldt - (1950) - shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Dachau Shoe - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• The Approved - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• Spiders I Have Known - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• Postcards from the Maginot Line - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams - (1977) - shortstory by Sylvia Plath
• In Bed One Night - (1988) - shortstory by Robert Coover
• Schrödinger's Cat - (1974) - shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Waterworks - (1984) - shortstory by E. L. Doctorow
• Shattered Like a Glass Goblin - (1968) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Human Moments in World War III - (1983) - shortstory by Don DeLillo
• The Anatomy of Desire - (1981) - shortstory by John L'Heureux
• Little Things - (1988) - shortstory by Raymond Carver
• The Temple - (1996) - shortstory by Joyce Carol Oates
• Freniere (from Interview with the Vampire) - (1976) - shortstory by Anne Rice
• A Short Guide to the City - (1990) - shortstory by Peter Straub
• In the Penny Arcade - (1984) - shortstory by Steven Millhauser
• The Reach - (1981) - shortstory by Stephen King
• Snow - (1985) - shortstory by John Crowley
• The Last Feast of Harlequin - (1990) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• Time and Again - (1983) - shortstory by Breece D'J Pancake
• Replacements - (1992) - novelette by Lisa Tuttle
• Spirit Seizures - (1987) - shortstory by Melissa Pritchard
• Cat in Glass - (1989) - shortstory by Nancy Etchemendy
• The Girl Who Loved Animals - (1988) - shortstory by Bruce McAllister
• Ursus Triad, Later - (1996) - shortstory by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
• (from Geek Love) The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth - (1989) - shortstory by Katherine Dunn
• Subsoil - (1994) - shortstory by Nicholson Baker

World Fantasy Award winning short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Stories: All-New Tales (2010), edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. The story is included in the collection The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011).

Sixteen neo-gothic tales of horror, the grotesque, and the dark side of the human imagination focus on the themes of violence in American society and the exploitation of women and children.

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman's resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates

"Time travel" -- and its hazards--are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America -- "Wainscotia, Wisconsin"--that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of "rehabilitation"--but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.

In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, Joyce Carol Oates writes: Life was not of the surface like the glossy skin of an apple, but deep inside the fruit where seeds are harbored. There is no writer more capable of picking out those seeds and exposing all their secret tastes and poisons than Oates herself?as brilliantly demonstrated in these six stories.

The book opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged Girl," an aging, jealous wife crafts an unusual game of Russian roulette involving a pair of Wedgewood teacups, a strong Bengal brew, and a lethal concoction of medicine. Who will drink from the wrong cup, the wife or the dance student she believes to be her husband's latest conquest? In "The Sign of the Beast," when a former Sunday school teacher's corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder?but is he really responsible? Another young outsider, Horace Phineas Love, Jr., is haunted by apparitions at the very edge of the spectrum of visibility after the death of his tortured father in "Night-Gaunts," a fantastic ode to H.P. Lovecraft.

Reveling in the uncanny and richly in conversation with other creative minds, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense stands at the crossroads of sex, violence, and longing?and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.

Table of Contents:

• The Woman in the Window
• The Long-Legged Girl
• Sign of the Beast
• The Experimental Subject
• Walking Wounded
• Night-Gaunts

It's the Fourth of July, a hot and heady time. Fireworks spark as a town celebrates the bloody fight for Independence. Teena Maguire and her daughter Bethie decide to leave the heat of the crowd and head home from the party. As they take the cooling walk home through the park, Teena feels uneasy. A group of boys catch sight of the pair from across the lake. The boys scent blood. They tease Teena, chase her and corner her in front of her daughter. Rape begins with what is almost unsayable, and tells of the brutality and cowardice that overtakes a small town in the aftermath of the attack. A diamond-hard dissection of modern mores, Rape is not only the story of Teena and Bethie and their insolent assailants but also the tale of their silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at its edges, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent and a powerful curse besets the families of the elite–their daughters begin disappearing. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.

When a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince, who might just be the devil, abducts a young bride on the verge of the altar, her brother sets out against all odds to find her. His path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, including Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House, soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power, the young idealist Upton Sinclair and his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Mark Twain–all of whom are plagued by "accursed" visions.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Dark Forces (1980), edited by Kirby McCauley. It can also be found in the anthology Witches' Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories By Women (1984), edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. The story is included in the collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994). A chapbook edition appeared in 1992.

From one of our most important contemporary writers, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a bold, haunting collection of six stories.

In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect "found dolls" from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they? In "Gun Accident," a teenage girl is thrilled when her favorite teacher asks her to house-sit, even on short notice. But when an intruder forces his way into the house while the girl is there, the fate of more than one life is changed forever. In "Equatorial," set in the exotic Galapagos, an affluent American wife experiences disorienting assaults upon her sense of who her charismatic husband really is, and what his plans may be for her.

In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the "fascination of the abomination" that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.

Table of Contents:

• The Doll-Master - (2015)
• Soldier - (2016)
• Gun Accident: An Investigation - (2016)
• Equatorial - (2016)
• Big Momma - (2016)
• Mystery, Inc. - (2016)

The Experimental Subject is a novella by Joyce Carol Oates. It originally appeared in the collection Night-Gaunts: and Other Tales of Suspense (2018).

The Woman in the Window is a novella by Joyce Carol Oates. It originally appeared in One Story #217 (2016).

Meet Quentin P.

He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do not believe the charge (sexual molestation of a minor) that got him in that bit of trouble.

He is a challenge for his court-appointed psychiatrist, who nonetheless is encouraged by the increasingly affirmative quality of his dreams and his openness in discussing them.

He is a thoroughly sweet young man for his wealthy grandmother, who gives him more and more, and can deny him less and less.

He is the most believable and thoroughly terrifying sexual psychopath and killer ever to be brought to life in fiction, as Joyce Carol Oates achieves her boldest and most brilliant triumph yet-a dazzling work of art that extends the borders of the novel into the darkest heart of truth.