![]() ![]() ![]() The surfaces of American life-department store displays in John Collier’s “Evening Primrose,” tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams’ “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”-become invested with haunting presences. “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. ![]() 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 Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” to proliferating identities set deliriously adrift in Tim Powers’ “Pat Moore.” While continuing to explore the classic themes of horror and fantasy, successive generations of writers-including Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser, and Thomas Ligotti-have opened up the field to new subjects, new styles, and daringly fresh expansions of the genre’s emotional and philosophical underpinnings. The second volume of Peter Straub’s 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. ![]()
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