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American Gothic Short Stories (Gothic Fantasy) Kindle Edition
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As with other titles in the series, new short fiction complements the work of classic authors including: Gertrude Atherton, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Brockden Brown, George Washington Cable, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Ralph Adams Cram, Stephen Crane, Emma Dawson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Glasgow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Shirley Jackson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Grace King, H.P. Lovecraft, Herman Melville, W.C. Morrow, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Trumbull Slosson, Clark Ashton Smith, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, Madeline Yale Wynne.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFlame Tree Collections
- Publication dateMarch 23, 2021
- File size7455 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B08C5L52QP
- Publisher : Flame Tree Collections; Deluxe edition (March 23, 2021)
- Publication date : March 23, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 7455 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 744 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,467,551 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,178 in Horror Fiction Classics
- #1,800 in U.S. Horror Fiction
- #2,750 in Horror Anthologies (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Lucy A. Snyder is the five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of 14 books:
* Sister, Maiden, Monster
* Halloween Season
* Exposed Nerves
* Garden of Eldritch Delights
* While the Black Stars Burn
* Spellbent
* Shotgun Sorceress
* Switchblade Goddess
* Soft Apocalypses
* Orchid Carousals
* Sparks and Shadows
* Chimeric Machines
* Installing Linux on a Dead Badger
* Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer's Survival Guide
Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Steampunk World, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5.
She has an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and lives in Ohio. You can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
You can learn more at her website: www.lucysnyder.com
Terri Bruce is the author of the paranormal/contemporary fantasy “Afterlife” series, which includes Hereafter (Afterlife #1) and Thereafter (Afterlife #2), and numerous short stories in various anthologies. She has been making up adventure stories for as long as she can remember. Like Anne Shirley, she prefers to make people cry rather than laugh, but is happy if she can do either. She produces hard-to-classify fantasy and science fiction stories that explore the supernatural side of everyday things from beautiful Downeast ME, where she lives with her husband and various cats. Visit her on the web at www.terribruce.net.
Russell R. James was raised on Long Island, New York and spent too much time watching Chiller, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Dark Shadows, despite his parents' warnings. Bookshelves full of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe didn't make things better. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of Central Florida.
After flying helicopters with the U.S. Army and a career as a technical writer, he now spins twisted tales best read in daylight, including horror thrillers Dark Inspiration, Q Island, and The Playing Card Killer. He authored the Grant Coleman Adventures series starting with Cavern of the Damned and the Ranger Kathy West series starting with Claws. He resides in sunny Florida. His wife reads his work, rolls her eyes, and says "There is something seriously wrong with you."
Visit his website at http://www.russellrjames.com, follow on Twitter @RRJames14, or say hello at Russell R. James or Russell James- Author on Facebook. Sign up for a free monthly newsletter at this link. https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/i5k2m1
Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she's left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Her series of time travel novellas, beginning with THE CONTINUUM, was published by World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com
Christi Nogle is the author of the novel Beulah (Cemetery Gates Media, 2022) and the forthcoming collections The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future, Promise, and One Eye Opened in That Other Place (Flame Tree Press, 2023 and 2024). Her short stories have appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Escape Pod, and Dark Matter Magazine. Follow her at http://christinogle.com and on Twitter @christinogle
Praise for The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future:
“Just as you think you have a handle on what a Christi Nogle story might be, you turn a page and are surprised anew. Enigmatic, surreal yet shockingly visceral, often rooted in a deceptively familiar domesticity turned nightmarish, these strange and unsettling tales unfold in lyrical prose that belies their savagery. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future is a haunting and memorable debut.”
--Lynda E. Rucker, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Moon Will Look Strange and You'll Know When You Get There
"An astonishingly original collection of dark tales - mysterious, haunting, challenging and disturbing, written in crystalline prose as compressed as poetry. Read and then reread and be doubly rewarded!"
-- Ramsey Campbell, author of Fellstones
"Without a doubt, Christi Nogle is one of my favorite new voices in horror. Her fiction is by turns devastating, horrifying, and beyond beautiful. With her collection, The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future, she's created something truly remarkable, the kind of horror that's filled with grit and heart. Don't miss this book; it's sure to be one of the very best collections of 2023."
-- Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and Reluctant Immortals
"Christi Nogle uses lush, inventive descriptions with surreal touches to create stories which both haunt and surprise. Her voice is distinctive, her characters richly and deeply portrayed. I was swept away."
-- Steve Rasnic Tem
"In this stunning collection, the familiar takes on strange and unsettling proportions. Christi Nogle’s stories are crisp, uncanny, haunting, and utterly captivating, with echoes of Shirley Jackson resonating through Nogle’s sharp and distinctive voice. Though I wanted to devour them, these are stories that deserve to be savored. The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future is truly weird fiction at its finest."
—Jo Kaplan, author of When the Night Bells Ring
"Christi Nogle takes readers on a dark yet wondrous journey through perils, horror, and thrills in this extraordinary debut collection. Behold the timelessness of these lives, these tales!"
-- Eric J. Guignard, award-winning author and editor, including That Which Grows Wild and Doorways to the Deadeye
"THE BEST OF OUR PAST, THE WORST OF OUR FUTURE brings to mind Big and Little Edie from Grey Gardens, but toss in some paranormal, tons of creepiness, and a Brian Evenson-esque descent through thick dread. Each story is gloriously laced with it."
-- Stephanie Nelson, author of The Vein
"Sophisticated, psychological horror that enfolds the reader in a shroud of fear. The Best of Our Past, The Worst of Our Future transported me into unfamiliar and terrifying worlds where the usual laws of nature don’t apply. Suspenseful, scary, addictive."
-- Catherine Cavendish, author of Dark Observation
Praise for Beulah:
“Nogle, like all writers with a rare knack coupled with incredible skill and imagination, makes everything she writes look easy and effortlessly ingenious. Even the Table of Contents of her latest novel, Beulah, reflects that sense of effortless ingenuity (The beginning chapter is called “When you talk to the dead”, followed by 12 month named titles, followed by the last chapter, “When you walk with the dead”). I’ve been lucky enough to publish Nogle’s short stories twice now, and I hope to publish her work many more times in the future. My initial reaction to reading this debut novel is simply this: how in the hell could this be anyone’s first novel? It’s so assured, so masterful, so in control at every level. This is not the typical mess of even the most talented writer’s first attempt at that tricky long form. This is the work of a top tier author in top form. Anyone writing a book blurb is tempted to summarize the plot and shower the book (and writer) with hyperbolic praise. I won’t do the former, and I promise you I’m not doing the latter. Nogle has all the goods, a singularly weird imagination, a tremendous sense of pacing and voice, and a mastery of clarity and control on the sentence level. Beulah will easily prove to be one of the best horror novels (never mind debut novels) of 2022. Read it. “
-Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism
With a skilled and unflinching hand, Nogle guides us through layers of time and experience in Beulah. Through the eyes of reluctantly “gifted” Georgie, we see what is usually hidden—the heartbreaking and terrifying—every rich and textured detail leading to a truly satisfying payoff. I will never forget this walk with the dead.
— J.A.W. McCarthy, author of SOMETIMES WE’RE CRUEL AND OTHER STORIES
Nemma Wollenfang is an MSc Postgraduate and prize-winning short story writer who lives in the gloomy, windswept North of England. Generally she adheres to Science Fiction – perhaps as a result of years in the laboratory cackling like a mad scientist – but she has been known to branch out, especially if there is a romantic twist to be had. Her stories have appeared in several venues, including: Beyond the Stars, Abyss & Apex, Cossmass Infinities, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Flame Tree’s Gothic Fantasy series. She is a recipient of the Speculative Literature Foundation's Working Class Writers Grant for her in-progress novel, and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and at her website: www.nemmawollenfang.co.uk.
Valerie has been writing twisty tales since discovering writing late in life. Several of her short stories have been published in anthologies, and she is working on her first novel. She lives in central Virginia with her very patient husband and two equally patient Golden Retrievers. Find out more about her at http://valeriebwilliams.com/
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mike Robinson is the award-winning author of multiple speculative fiction novels and dozens of short stories which have appeared in the likes of 2019's American Gothic Fantasy anthology, Storyteller Magazine, A Woman Unbecoming, Underland Arcana and more. He has received honors from Writers of the Future, Publishers Weekly's BookLife Contest, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Maxy Awards and others, and is also the editor of J.P. Barnett's popular, award-winning "Lorestalker" series.
In between, he hikes (often with his two dogs), swims, draws, tries to learn the didgeridoo and, yes, has even been known to actually write a screenplay or two, some of which have received their own notices.
www.mike-robinsonauthor.com
"One of the best speculative fiction authors writing now."
-- Leslie Ann Moore, bestselling author of the "Griffin's Daughter" series
"Chock full of gooey mind-bending goodness. Mike Robinson delivers equal parts of scares and the bizarre with wit and style―put him on your list of authors to watch!"
-- Guy Anthony De Marco, HWA Bram Stoker Award Finalist
Lynette Mejía writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror prose and poetry from the middle of a deep, dark forest in the wilds of southern Louisiana. Her work has been nominated for the Rhysling Award the the Million Writers Award. You can find her online at www.lynettemejia.com.
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Unfortunately these stories aren't alone. As American history moved forward into the mid-20th we started to lose the thread of what makes something truly Gothic and filled with terror; our familiarity with common story elements cheapened them and we became bored, and that shows very prominently in the more modern entries here. True Gothic fiction -- where something that used to be old and grand is now decrepit and sad, where once-great institutions are no help against the lonely darkness -- gives way to silly, "Syfy Channel" style horror; predictable and generally lacking in talent.
I'd say probably three fourths of this collection is really worth reading; the other quarter is boring at best and garbage at worst. Feel free to skip anything that has a listing in the back (under the "authors" section) as "first time published", especially a melodramatic story called "Graveyards Full", a woke fantasy where the only character requirement is being LGBTQ (literally every single character is) and where the author can give full vent to his oddly misapplied anger at the Catholic Church.
That's the worst one in the entire book, in terms of quality of writing and subject interest (and even if you're interested in gay lit, this one is very, very ham-handed). Every other entry ranges from "they sure use a lot of words to say very little" to "interesting but flawed" to "I will remember this forever". Very eclectic, and overall worth your time, but not without its skippable moments.
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