American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now, 

At its core, writes editor Peter Straub, the fantastic is a way of seeing. In place of gothic trappings, the post-war masters of the fantastic often substitute an air of apparent normality. The surfaces of American life--department store displays in John Colliers Evening Primrose, tar-paper roofs seen from an el train in Fritz Leibers Smoke Ghost, the balcony of a dilapidated movie theater in Tennessee Williams The Mysteries of the Joy Rio--become invested with haunting presences. The sphere of family life is transformed, in Davis Grubbs Where the Woodbine Twineth or Richard Mathesons Prey, into an arena of eerie menace. Dramas of madness, malevolent temptation, and vampiristic appropriation play themselves out against the backdrop of modern urban life in John Cheevers Torch Song and Shirley Jacksons unforgettable The Daemon Lover.

Nearly half the stories collected in this volume were published in the last two decades, including work by Michael Chabon, M. Rickert, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, and Benjamin Percy: writers for whom traditional genre boundaries have ceased to exist, and who have brought the fantastic into the mainstream of contemporary writing.