I'm torn because I love all of these stories -- this is a great slice of American spooky fiction, on a story-by-story level... but also, it's 2020. And there's one story here by a person of color.
Look, to some small extent, I can understand the argument that it's a historical collection (despite having a Shirley Jackson story) and also that I should at least be glad that the table of contents has more women than men and that ~is~ something... but, I don't know, I just wish this was a more diverse collection is all. The stories are great, they're spooky as hell and classically so -- but there's so much more to American Midnights than what Laird Barron collected here.

I really enjoyed this - an eclectic anthology of mostly canonical short horror stories, all in their way fundamentally American. Obvious heayweights like Poe, Hawthorne and Jackson are represented, along with some less often thought of as horror writers like Zora Neale Hurston. The last story (An Itinerant House) was, especially, a delight and previously unfamiliar to me. The Pushkin Press edition looks like it will be be handsome in person, too. Recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book. A lot of great spooky stories to enjoy. I loved every one of them. Great shorta story collection.

American Midnight is a beautiful collection of classic "horror" stories. I had previously read almost all of these stories in middle/ high school. They are all very solid stories. They are not all scary, but horror has evolved greatly from when many of these stories were written and it takes a lot more in the year 2020 to be seen as spooky than it did back when these stories were first written. Poe's short stories introduced me to horror when I was about 10 years old, so his works will always hold a very special place in my heart. Is there anything new for the hard core horror lover like myself, probably not; however, it is a solid collection to add to the bookshelves. The cover is gorgeous and you can never go wrong with the classics!

Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read the book. I found the different stories in the book to be well written but didn't certainly didn't hit the horror mark for me. The book was lacking in both the horror and suspense and as such felt disappointed after completing the book. If you like your horror gritty and hard hitting this book isn't for you.

Sunny afternoons in May might not be the most obvious time to read ghost stories, but Pushkin Press's new collection of eerie American tales are enough to send a chill up the spine no matter what the time of year. Selected and edited by Laird Hunt, these classic stories span the 19th and 20th centuries, and their settings include barricaded castles; modest lodging houses; wooded roads; aesthetic Parisian apartments; forest glades; and supposedly comfortable country houses. The general trend is to unsettle rather than terrify, for which I was grateful, because my overactive imagination really doesn't need any encouragement in the dark reaches of the night. Including works by Edgar Alan Poe, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, this is likely to include a couple of tales you're already familiar with, but will introduce you to at least a few new friends, ready to raise the goosebumps on your arms...

The best way to do this, I think, is to say a few lines about each of the nine stories included in this collection. That way you can see which stories are included - and make sure you're not duplicating too many things you already own - and, since each of the stories has its own distinct flavour, it does away with the need for awkward generalisations. Note the pleasing fact that five of the nine stories are by women.

The Masque of the Red Death (1842): Edgar Allan Poe

This is the big one, the story that everyone knows even if they haven't read it. When the world is stricken by a terrifying blood plague, Prince Prospero decides to thumb his nose at death: 'The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think'. Gathering one thousand friends, he retreats to a magnificent castle and closes the doors, embarking on a dizzying sequence of parties and banquets. It's the ultimate lockdown experience. But can you truly cheat death? One night, in the midst of a splendid masquerade ball, Prince Prospero is to meet his match. A story that gains new levels when read in the light of the present Covid-19 crisis, as we try to barricade ourselves within our homes and to keep the virus out. Unexpectedly timely and relevant.

Young Goodman Brown (1835): Nathaniel Hawthorne

I hadn't read this story before - in fact, I haven't read much Hawthorne at all, with the exception of The Marble Faun (which I loved) and The Seven Gables (which I didn't like quite so much). In this short story he whisks us back to 17th-century Salem, where the titular young man is heading off on a mysterious journey on an unspecified but dangerous night (Halloween, surely?). His young wife Faith begs him not to go, but Brown is determined to meet his destiny. However, when a sinister meeting in the woods leads him to question all that he has ever believed, his confidence falters. Faced with a stark choice between faith and belonging, what will he choose? And, having chosen, how will he ever trust his fellow man again? A curious story, with a remarkably civilised Devil, which obviously reminded me strongly of The Crucible; but I wonder whether all is truly as it seems. Are all the people whom the devil shows to Goodman Brown really there, or are they just phantoms, intended to undermine his faith in his honest neighbours? Thoughts in the comments please.

The Eyes (1910): Edith Wharton

This was one of my two favourite stories in the collection. It takes the form of a story told by firelight to the narrator by his friend Culwin, an elderly gentleman with a hint of misanthropy ('his study of the human race seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary only because someone had to do the cooking'). Culwin recounts the extraordinary story of a pair of red-rimmed, demonic eyes that appear floating at the bottom of his bed on certain occasions. The first time he sees this apparition, he flees to Europe, but soon he will find that there is no escape. But is this truly a haunting? Wharton pulls off a clever ending to the story, which reminds us that of all our phantoms, sometimes it's hardest to escape ourselves.

The Mask (1895): Robert W. Chambers

Along with The Eyes, this was my other favourite story. It comes from a collection of Chambers's stories which centred around an eerie (fictional) play titled The King in Yellow, although here the link is a loose one (the character flicks through the play, and a quote from it provides the epigraph). Set in the artistic community in Paris, it follows the narrator's friendship with the sculptor Boris and his beautiful wife Genevieve, for whom our narrator has long felt a tendresse. Chambers writes rich prose, the kind in which you can lose yourself: luxurious descriptive passages conjure up the decorative wealth of Boris's elegant home, which centres on an Islamic-style bathing room with a sunken bath. This becomes significant, as one day Boris confesses to our narrator that he has made an extraordinary discovery: a solution that immediately petrifies living objects. Our narrator is tantalised, then horrified, realising the ghoulish potential of this discovery; and, when tragedy strikes, he fears that he will be haunted by Boris's rash deeds forever. But Chambers's story is a rarity: a not-exactly ghost story that allows for the possibility of a new beginning at its end. Unusual, haunting, and lovely.

Home (1965): Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson was bound to be included here. I've only read a couple of her stories so far, most notably We Have Always Lived In The Castle, which I thought was wonderful. Here we follow the Sloanes, a young couple settling into their new home on the outskirts of a small town: a far cry from their old life in the city. Ethel Sloane is determined to fit in, so she makes an effort to chat to the townsfolk, stocks up at their shops, and smiles at their superstitious worries about the road that winds up through the woods to her house. What's the matter with the road? It's narrow, but don't they trust her driving? Driving, it turns out, is to be the least of her worries when Ethel encounters a mysterious old woman with a shivering child at the side of the road. Definitely unsettling, and Jackson never quite tells us how the thing is resolved - if it ever is? 

A Ghost Story (1870): Mark Twain

This story starts in the time-honoured fashion: a dark lodging house; an isolated room; strange noises in the night. Our narrator is clearly plagued by some kind of visitation, but you swiftly realise that Twain is deliberately laying it on thick for comic effect. When the narrator finally confronts the ghost that's causing all the trouble, it takes a most unexpected form. To make matters more embarrassing from the ghost's point of view, it turns out that it's haunting entirely the wrong place (and might, indeed, be even more misguided than that). Not only a delicious parody of ghost stories, but a witty satire on the Cardiff Giant, a supposedly petrified ten-foot-tall man, whose body had been unearthed on a farm in Cardiff, New York state in 1869. Drawing enormous crowds, the Giant was swiftly revealed as a complete hoax (if you take a look at photos, it's hard to understand why anyone was ever taken in: it's a statue of decidedly mediocre workmanship). Twain takes up the story and runs with gusto, in a tale that would have been sharply relevant at the time, and remains comic even without the context.

Spunk (1925): Zora Neale Hurston

A short but eerie story based around the oldest plot of all: hubris, and a fall. Spunk Banks is a swaggering god of a man, apparently irresistible to any woman on whom he sets his eye. At the moment it's Lena, the wife of meek, mild-mannered Joe Kanty, who barely has the courage to look his mocking neighbours in the eye ('his Adam's apple was galloping up and down his neck like a racehorse. Ah bet he's wore out half a dozen Adam's apples since Spunk's been on the job with Lena'). When Joe finally has the courage to stand up to Spunk, a tragic exchange leaves one man dead. But can envy and hatred last longer than life? The locals certainly think so, as a sinister series of events closes in on the members of this ill-fated love triangle. It was great to finally read something by Hurston (I have Their Eyes Were Watching God and Barracoon on my Kindle, but haven't yet started either of them). I initially found the rendition of accent and dialect rather difficult, but as I adjusted to it, it added rich atmosphere to this hot-house tale of sexual jealousy.

The Yellow Wallpaper (1892): Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I've written about this story before, but it's always a pleasure to reread this tale of frustration and isolation. Like The Masque of the Red Death, it gains a certain je ne sais quoi in the light of lockdown, when so many of us are spending more time with our wallpaper than we ever thought possible. A gifted writer, laid low with what must be post-natal depression, is spirited away by her physician husband for a country retreat. He rubbishes her psychological symptoms, insisting that she is physically well and that everything else is within her power to command; her mental health is a matter of will. Confined and babied, our narrator finds her frustrated creativity breaking out in disturbing ways as she studies the strangely patterned yellow wallpaper in their adopted bedroom: 'I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere'. And it becomes worse, as the patterns begin to take on new forms which reflect her own lack of fulfilment: 'it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern ... The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out'. On one hand, a classic spine-tingling story. On another, a feminist classic in which the infantilisation and confinement of women leads to psychological collapse.

An Itinerant House (1897): Emma Frances Dawson

The final story of this collection tells of an act of cruelty followed by an act of misguided kindness. The residents of a San Francisco lodging house are shocked when their landlord announces that he's bringing his wife across the country to live with them. No one is more shocked than Felipa, the Mexican woman who believed that she was his wife in all but name. Felled by grief, and brought to the point of death, she is resurrected by the well-meaning lodgers using electrical currents. However, Filipa is not grateful for her restoration to life, and she latches on a muttered comment half-overheard during her stupor, that she is 'better dead than alive'. A living ghost, her evil influence lingers over the young men who tried so foolishly to alter the course of nature. As they disperse, they find their lives being haunted by strange events and tragic deaths. And everything seems to draw them back to San Francisco where, again and again, they hear tales of a house in which a room drives all within it to misery, suicide and death. 

I confess that I was initially confused by the story. How could a house possibly move? Was that part of the story's eeriness? Not so, as it turned out. As so often happens, truth is stranger than fiction. Dawson refers to the custom of actually physically moving houses from one place to another, which was facilitated by the use of pre-fab iron structures. The moving of sturdier houses was documented in 1970s San Francisco by the photographer Dave Glass. He took photos of the extraordinary practice, which you can see here. And houses aren't all that have been moved. Telephone exchanges, presidential palaces, theatres and Marble Arch have all been shifted in mind-boggling feats of engineering savoir-faire.

This is a well-balanced collection, with stories from different periods, and in a variety of moods, with a good blend of old-fashioned ghost stories and more inventive paranormal tales. These are the kind of stories to prickle pleasingly under the collar in a Gothic way, rather than leaving the reader terrified to turn off the light at night, and they make for a wonderful introduction to the field of dark American fiction. 

This review will be published on my blog on Tuesday 12 May 2020 at the following link:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/05/12/american-midnight-2019-laird-hunt

The cover for this book drew me in. THEN i saw the TOC. My heart was filled with such happiness! I've read a few of these stories before and love them very much. The Yellow Wallpaper, Young Goodman Brown AND The Masque of the Red Death?! YES! I enjoyed these classics and the ones that were new to me as well.

**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

Laird Hunt's American Midnight Tales of the Dark is a selection of short stories from a variety of authors in horror literature.

I was happy to have the opportunity to read the selection as some I was already familiar with and others were new to me. As with every short story collection I seem to have read, I definitely had stories I liked better than others.

Overall, I felt the selection was well chosen and that any horror or ghost story fan could find at least one story that appealed to them.

A very welcome and entertaining collection of stories for Hallowe'en – or indeed any evening when this kind of fiction might appeal. We start with 'The Masque of the Red Death', which is more or less Poe at his best – packing a lot into what will be to some a surprisingly short little tale. Next, Nathaniel Hawthorne – a writer I've rarely if ever read – gives more than a sense of the O Henry to his legend of a Salem-set meeting with the Devil. Edith Wharton's story is a little too wordy in set-up, but in mysteriously plaguing a young man, only that night affianced, by a pair of spectral, red eyes at the foot of his bed, does make the hairs rise. Hardly a ghost story, but 'The Mask' by Robert W Chambers turns on ideas from Pygmalion, Romeo and Juliet and any number of stories featuring stereotypes of young artists – but the end result is surprisingly effective. It seems to be a favourite of Pushkin the publishers, though, as it's not the first time they've released a book with it in.


Shirley Jackson has some modern yokels saying 'ooh you don't want to be driving up that road in weather like this', and the recipient of that dread news taking it as a badge of honour, as she's a new resident in town. The piece is snappy and fun. Mark Twain might have been both those, but while he showed that you can have copious ghosts in a story and still get away with it, they didn't really suit the humour he finishes with. I've not come across the vernacular of Zora Neale Hurston before, but it was fairly easy to engage with the dialogue of the po' black men witnessing a cuckolded husband from the safety of their logging town's general store windows. Best here, as it is with pretty much anything it's published alongside, is 'The Yellow Wallpaper', a classic that is not strictly a genre piece, but is all the better for being whatever it is. Unfortunately we close with a dud, the piece 'An Itinerant House', which (a) relies on its audience, well over a century past its being written, knowing about a certain kind of mobile home, and (b) floods its tale of ill-wrought revenge with about two thousand literary quotes, spurts of poetry, flutters of music nobody will recognise, and more cultural references that make a right porridge of it all.

On the whole though, this book definitely stands as a fine collection. No longer will we all deem it necessary to go back to the Old World for our chills – this really does highlight the American canonical craft in and out of the genre labelled 'horror'. A strong four stars.

A good one for fans of horror or short stories. This is a great collection from well-known authors and a fun read.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the early review copy.

Awesome collection of classic stories! I've already read some of them, but it's always nice to revisit familiar stories.

“Scary stories bang at our deep bells, the ones that live in the pit of our stomachs, at the base of our spines.”
--
A spine tingling and blood chilling collection of scary stories, best read at the deep dark of the night when the veil between the real and the supernatural feels perilously thin.
American Midnight takes off with Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” to set the tone, particularly poignant at the moment for its social-distancing and plague vibes, and moves on to other wonderfully wicked stories like that of a midnight stroll in the woods with the devil, a spooky ghost story of dreadful visions told by the fireplace, and a night of unexpected terror at an old house (Mark Twain is really full of surprises in this one!)
Overall, Shirley Jackson’s Home and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper were absolute masterpieces of terror and tension, and shone in this collection.
Apart from the final story in the book, which was an unexpected disappointment of painfully contrived story-telling and complex narrative gibberish in an otherwise amazing collection, American Midnight is a must for horror-lovers like myself, to feel the thrill of a good scare!

More often than not, I get little or no satisfaction from reading tense, nerve-shredding tales such as these, especially at night. However, so engrossing were these stories that I did not even realize I came to the end. What a delight!
The stories that find a place in this collection of dark tales are all from canonical writers ranging from Poe to Edith Wharton, Shirley Jackson to Mark Twain. I did not even know that some of these authors had produced works in this genre. Horror, mystery, suspense and thrill; all intertwined in this potpourri of rare stories by remarkable writers.I read this book three nights in a row in a candlelit room with a buddy, which without a doubt tripled the effect. My personal favorites from the collection are The Eyes by Edith Wharton; Home by Shirley Jackson, The Mask by Robert W. Chambers and Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (I must say, the fact that the book started with a plague story gave me the creeps)
I absolutely treasured the content and until the final story by Emma Frances Dawson everything was phenomenal but that finale was such a bore that made me want to throw the book out the window.
However, all in all a great reading experience of the genre and definitely recommended!

A collection of the most haunted stories ever written. I had an amazing time reading about the paranormal accounts that each story had to offered. The atmospheric phrasing and a creepy narration is down right bone chilling. The book begins with an introduction that described an incident which spent chills down my spine. The collection starts with The masque of the red death written by Edgar Allen Poe, the iconic author whose writing introduced me to Gothic literature. My favorite was The yellow wallpaper, the ending was that story was just unforeseeneable.

All I can say about this book is the author chose these tales carefully. Each story has this unusual twist and turns that made them unpredictably spooky. I think this is what makes American Midnight: Tales of the Dark different from any other anthologies. I would definitely recommend this!

I love that these stories are in a compendium! The Yellow Wallpaper is my all time favorite short story so when I saw it was in here I had to read the rest of the stories. I’ve read a few of them (like the Poe story) but others were new and I am so glad I’ve been introduced. I love creepy stories from all time periods, and I think it’s really cool to market these classics to a younger audience. I’ll probably buy this and reread it when it comes out!

This was a well thought out collection of well-loved classics in the genre of American horror. This would be a great introductory book for people interested in the development of horror or as a reader for a horror survey class

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, 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.

A well-selected handful of short tales of the supernatural, this book gives some light scares from classic American authors. Poe and Wharton were standouts as usual, and it was nice to see the perennial ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ pop up yet again. Hawthorne is, by far, the weakest, lending little in terms of scares. Zora Neale Hurston and Shirley Jackson were also pleasantly eerie- it was nice to come across a couple of stories I’d not read! While a strong collection, it didn’t really have enough compiled, and there could have been some other scarier pieces included, and perhaps more modern ones too. A solid little set but would just benefit from a bit more meat on its bones.

A creepy selection of stories, where, even reading in the sunshine the spine tingly suspense leaked through.
Particular faves: The Masque of the Red by Death Edgar Allan Poe and The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

A great read for anyone who is a fan of classic horror or short stories. With a solid mix of stories, this collection would be a great addition to any horror fans collection. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the early review copy.