American Gothic

The dark hallway, the unlit fireplace, the walls of your own bedroom-such familiar places and ordinary objects are possessed of a hidden terror that is revealed by the twenty-five stories in American Gothic . Master storytellers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Ambrose Bierce, entice the reader to pass from the reasoned, ordered world of everyday life into the murky underside of the human psyche. Drawn from nearly a century of American writing, these tales horrify-not by showing blood and gore and fantastic creatures, but by exposing the evil that shares our world. This evil, in fact, is often the product of our own minds. Stories such as "Young Goodman Brown," "The Yellow Wall-Paper," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "An Illusion in Red and White," and "The Eyes of the Panther" invoke the power of the human mind and warn that what you see may not really be there. Whether the setting be the torrid South or the frigid North, these tales are guaranteed to both fever the imagination and chill the blood.