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Fresh fright flows in two collections

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 25, 2009

"American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny From Poe to the Pulps"; "American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny From the 1940s to Now," edited by Peter Straub (Library of America, $35 each)

There are scary stories, and then there are scary stories, just as there is writing, and then there is writing. Evidence supporting that fuzzy tautology is abundantly provided in this excellent two-volume collection, "American Fantastic Tales," edited by Peter Straub.

Straub - a dab hand at scary stories himself, notably the novel aptly titled "Ghost Story" - provides a helpful and instructive introduction to each volume. Each is different, of course, but in both he finds the theme of loss of individual human will haunting a great number of the stories.

One matter Straub does not discuss is literary quality. That may be a slippery notion, but one thing that becomes clear after reading 86 stories is that some are more enjoyable and satisfying - and scary - because their concepts rise above the cliched and hackneyed through fresh, original writing.

John Collier's "Evening Primrose" (1940), for instance, is a pedestrian tale of a poet who turns his back on an uncaring world to go live in a department store, where he discovers an underworld of ghostly creatures. What any of them is up to is difficult to ascertain; it has not even the virtue of ambiguity.

Thomas Tessier's "Nocturne" (2000) has ambiguity to spare, but the reader has no reason to care whether the inexplicable act at its center is a suicide or performance art.

How happily, then, we come upon John Cheever's "Torch Song" (1947), a vampire story in which the lives of a man and woman intersect several times over the years. Perhaps it is a psychological vampirism, for we cannot tell whether the woman - "the lewd and searching shape of death" - has really fed on the decline and death of several men or has been involuntarily and sympathetically attracted to desperate men. The effect is creepy and the ambiguity worth pondering.

Or Edgar Allan Poe's "Berenice" (1835). Gothic with a vengeance, its central theme lies in the question that the main character, Egaeus, asks himself: "How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?" Good question, for Berenice begins to deteriorate from some disease until only her teeth remain healthy. Egaeus obsesses over the teeth, even after her death, in a trancelike state that leads to a gruesome act that may raise the hairs on the back of your head.

Finally, a mention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922). For me, it is among the least noteworthy of Fitzgerald's stories, but you may want to read it to see how it differs from the recent movie.

Roger K. Miller, a former book-review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.

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