Pieces from Martin Amis (an extract from London Fields), Jeanette Winterson, Robert Coover, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Anne Rice (from Interview with the Vampire), John Hawkes (from Monks in Shadow), Ruth Rendell (an extract from King Solomon's Carpet), Peter Strauss (from "Throat") etc. In the introduction the editors write
- "Gothic fiction, in its earliest days, was known by the props and settings it employed, by its furniture. ... With Poe the gothic turns inward, and starts rigorously to explore extreme states of psychological disturbance" p.xi
- "Then, as now, the gothic clearly delighted in moving to the dark term of any opposition it encountered. Inversion was its basic structural principle" p.xiii
The piece by Jeanette Winterson has "Didn't they, like you, need a heart that was a book with no last page? Turn the leaves" and ends with "But now, says Tom, the hills are ripe and the water leaps at my throat when I shave. Tick-tock says the clock in Newton."
A few pieces are experimental - Acker's is beyond me. Paul West's piece includes "I had been kept waiting all those centuries. I did not have to be nice, clever, or polite. All I had to do was hunker down in my shower stall, by which I mean squat on the stump of my brain stem. and ogle the sow bugs as they inched along by the lintel, sometimes climbing it to look at my vertical Ganges."
The extracts (barring those of Amis and Strauss) aren't good at all - too plain.
Scott Bradfield's piece about "the young men" was my favourite - borderline gothic. Bradford Morrow's piece was good too - a man steals especially from people he loves.
John Edgar Wideman's piece was too long. It could have been excellent. William T. Vollman's story is based on a promising idea. Too long.
Nicholas Royle has managed to find several good gothic pieces when selecting for Best British Short Stories.
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