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.

This is a great collection of short stories. Some are downright creepy while others get you thinking. I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes short stories.

I enjoyed this classic collection. There were a quite a few standouts but there were also couple stories mixed in that I could have done without. My favorites were The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, Home by Shirley Jackson, and The Eyes by Edith Wharton. I also enjoyed Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne and A Ghost Story by Mark Twain. All-in-all I found the majority of the stories interesting and thought-provoking. Some were pretty creepy and timely as well. I’d definitely recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys classic short stories incorporating elements of horror. These aren’t necessarily the type of horror stories that will keep you up at night but they do make you stop and think.

I think it’s ok... not really terrifying enough. A little bit dull. But the way it’s set out and the writing style of each author flows well. I can see why people will enjoy this but it’s not for me.