American Midnight: Tales of the Dark

American Midnight: Tales of the Dark

Stories selected and introduced by Laird Hunt

A book review 

The “Pushkin Collection” by Pushkin Press is growing into a veritable library of attractive volumes of great literature.  It is particularly strong on world fiction, featuring several Continental and Eastern authors in new translations.  In this respect, American Midnight: Tales of the Dark, one of the latest publications to join its fold (quite appropriately, on Halloween 2019), is somewhat atypical – an anthology of classic horror stories by US authors, selected and introduced by Laird Hunt (himself a purveyor of contemporary speculative fiction of the “literary” sort).

Although this book will certainly appeal to lovers of horror, it seems to be directed at a more “mainstream” readership.  The nine featured stories, in fact, include some very well-known works, alongside others which were new to me. Except for the somewhat surprising omission of Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, the usual suspects all make an appearance.  The anthology starts with Edgar Allan Poe, the great American master of the macabre, specifically his The Masque of the Red Death, which feels particularly chilling when read at a time of a deadly pandemic. Robert Chambers’ cult short story collection “The King in Yellow” is represented by The Mask, the second story of the cycle.  There’s the widely anthologized, yet always welcome, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic feminist tale of psychological horror.  Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne manages to be both profoundly Gothic and quintessentially American in its exploration of the themes of sin and collective guilt in the context of Puritan New England.

Other stories are less familiar. Mark Twain provides an example of comic Gothic in A Ghost Story, inspired by the “Cardiff Giant”, one of the most famous hoaxes in American history. The “petrified giant” was created by atheist George Hull in a dig at fundamentalist Christians and their literal interpretation of Genesis (and its reference to “giants” roaming the Earth). The hoax gave rise to a famous lawsuit, after P.T.Barnum made a copy of the giant and branded the original giant as fake.  Twain imagines a late-night meeting with the ghost of the “Cardiff Giant” who, duped by Barnum’s ‘copy’, ends up haunting the “fake” fake. 

First published in “The New Negro” in 1925, Spunk was the third short story written by Zora Neale Hurston.  In its portrayal of a love triangle in a community of the Deep South, it combines an earthy “realist” approach with supernatural elements.  I was less impressed by An Itinerant House, by poet Emma Frances Dawson. Ambrose Bierce, himself a master of horror fiction, was a keen supporter of Dawson’s work and particularly her atmospheric descriptions of San Francisco: “a city of wraiths and things forbidden to the senses”.  Her story is based on the most original premise in the volume –a “cursed” house which seems to travel from place to place, plaguing the protagonists of the tale.  Unfortunately, this striking concept, with its interesting combination of the supernatural and early sci-fi, is buried in pages of intellectual discourse and cultural references which rob it of its immediacy.

Laird Hunt’s choices underline the vital contribution made by female writers to the classic horror genre. Indeed, my two favourite stories in the volume are written by women.  Edith Wharton’s The Eyes falls within tradition of the classic ‘English’ ghost story, including its “tale-by-the-fireside” framing device.  The narrator is invited to a dinner given by a friend of his, one Andrew Culwin, an aged “confirmed bachelor”.  As is wont to happen, the talk turns to ghosts, and at the insistence of his latest protégé, Culwin gives an account of a mysterious apparition of a pair of eyes which plagued him in his youth. This apparently ‘trivial’ story reveals much about the psychological make-up of Culwin.  Enigmatic and charged with sexual tension, this story gives no easy ‘solutions’ to the enigma of the eyes, leaving it up to readers to reach their own conclusions. 

As in Wharton’s case, there’s more than a nod to the classic ghost story in Shirley Jackson’s Home. But just as Jackson reclaims for herself the haunted house genre in The Haunting of Hill House, here she gives her own spin to the tale of a naïve city dweller who moves to a country house with ghosts attached.  Scary and dark, but with a wicked humour which is Jackson’s own, this is the perfect example of how classic horror can be reinvented to great effect.  

Kindle Edition, 320 pages

Published October 31st 2019 by Pushkin Press