Read more
Zusatztext Praise for Penguin Horror Classics: “The new Penguin Horror editions! selected by Guillermo del Toro! feature some of the best art-direction (by Paul Buckley) I've seen in a cover in quite some time.” – Cory Doctorow! Boing Boing "Each cover does a pretty spectacular job of evoking the mood of the title in bold! screenprint-style iconography." – Dan Solomon! Fast Company Informationen zum Autor S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer, scholar, and editor whose previous books include Documents of American Prejudice ; In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women ; God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong ; Atheism: A Reader ; H. L. Mencken on Religion; The Agnostic Reader ; and What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays by Mark Twain. Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, and designer, most famous for his Academy Award-winning film, Pan's Labyrinth , and the Hellboy film franchise. He has received the Nebula, Hugo, and Bram Stoker awards and is an avid collector and student of arcane memorabilia and weird fiction. Klappentext Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro. American Supernatural Tales is the ultimate collection of weird and frightening American short fiction. As Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. The book celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation's brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and-of course-Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good collection of stories. S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer, scholar, and editor whose previous books include Documents of American Prejudice ; In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women ; God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong ; Atheism: A Reader ; H. L. Mencken on Religion; The Agnostic Reader ; and What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays by Mark Twain. INTRODUCTION The supernatural in literature can be said to have its roots in the earliest specimens of Western literature, if we take cognizance of such monsters as the Cyclops, the Hydra, Circe, Cerberus, and others in Greek myth. There is, however, a question as to whether, prior to a few centuries ago, such entities would have been regarded as properly supernatural; for a given creature or event to be regarded as supernatural, one must have a clearly defined conception of the natural, from which the supernatural can be regarded as an aberration or departure. In Western culture, the parameters of the natural have been increasingly delimited by science, and it is therefore not surprising that the supernatural, as a distinct literary genre, first emerged in the eighteenth century, when scientific advance had reached a stage where certain phenomena could be recognized as manifestly beyond the bounds of the natural. H. P. Lovecraft, one of the leading theoreticians of the genre as well as one of its pioneering practitioners, emphasized this point somewhat flamboyantly in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927): The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws ...
