The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction

by Bradford Morrow (Editor)

In time The New Gothic brilliantly reanimates--and reinvents--the genre of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, celebrating the vigorous return of sophisticated horror. Contributors include Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell, and Peter Straub, among many others. Eeriness abounds."--Washington Post Book World.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Gothic, Fiction, Anthologies, Fantasy, Contemporary

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, to work as a rare book dealer. In 1981 he relocated to New York City to the literary journal Conjunctions, which he founded with the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and to write novels. He and his two cats divide their time between NYC and upstate New York.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Reviews

[Elentarri · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories and a few excerpts from novels, such as the one from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.  The majority of the selection did not appeal to me.  Apparently I like my Gothic fiction to be the old fashioned kind with "dark forests and dripping cellars, ruined abbeys riddled with secret passages, clanking chains, skeletons, thunderstorms, and moonlight*", preferably also with supernatural entities and monsters; not this "contemporary" (the book was published in 1991) gothic that apparently explores the "extreme states of psychological disturbance*" that left me wonder what the hell I had just read most of the time.  The stories I enjoyed the most were The Road to Nadeja by Bradford Morrow and The Smell by Patrick McGarth.  I found the remainder of the stories to be generally forgettable.

*direct quote from the Introduction by B. Morrow and P. McGarth.

[M Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading an awful lot of story anthologies lately, and the word "uneven" seems to occur to me just about every time. No exception here, I'm afraid. Despite the roster of respected names on display here, from experimentalists to literary mainstays, writers with horror/fantasy credentials and those who work in other genres such as mysteries, many seemed not to know what to do with the theme.

Complicating matters further is the editors' use of novel excerpts, rather than stories specifically crafted to fit here. The Anne Rice and Peter Straub excerpts, at least, were some of the better writing on display, and somewhat suited to the theme.

I most enjoyed the short stories of Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, Joyce Carol Oates and Angela Carter, all of them inventive, colorfully told and evocative. Otherwise, the most interesting stories were by writers I previously knew by name only, like Ruth Rendell and Scott Bradfield, or hadn't heard of before, as in the case of Jamaica Kincaid and Emma Tennant.

Conversely, some of the more established names whose work I looked forward to here -- Martin Amis, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Kathy Acker and William T. Vollman -- disappointed. At least Acker and Vollman displayed a knack for stringing together a nicely-formed sentence. Amis, Hawkes and Coover all three lost me early on. Their stories seemed less about engaging the reader and more about amusing the writers themselves with puns, crudity and pointless wackiness.

I know some readers frown upon fiction writers, who are also editors, including work in their own edited anthologies. It's interesting that two of the better stories here are by the editors of The New Gothic, Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath. Morrow's "The Road to Nadeja" drew me in as much as anything in the book. A compellingly drawn narrative. McGrath's "The Smell" was strongly narratived, a great imitation of the old-fashioned Gothic in terms of both voice and tone.

In the end, I was left thinking this "New Gothic" movement, if there ever was such a thing (this was released in 1992), lacked the vitality and momentum to deserve a title, let alone to support a themed anthology of this kind.

[James S. · Rating 1 out of 5]

A terrible anthology. A big red flag right from the start: including novel excerpts as short stories. That should have been enough for me to skip it.

Alas, I didn't, and I subjected myself to several of the most infuriating, meandering, and pretentious short "stories" I've ever tried to read. Stories in quotation marks because at best the ones I sampled are nothing more than uninteresting prose poems.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were so good, some just weird, and others tedious. I expected more. The best were by familiar authors - Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell, Peter Straub. The editors each included one story, and they were both good. Overall, disappointing.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most anthologies, this does contain a number of excellent pieces, but there are some problems with it as a collection. It looks like they were trying to cobble together the beginnings of a movement, but there is a fair amount of disparity in these pieces. The only thing they have in common is that they are all more or less literary works that present a somewhat gothic sensibility, altho I would argue that a couple of them dont even have that. Included here are works that are overtly gothic, but others that are from very different genres, like experimental fiction. A couple of the pieces are not even short stories, but excerpts from longer works, like a fine clip from Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire (I guess they had to include her), and a completely unnecessary bit from Martin Amis's London Fields (I like Amis, but there is no way you could consider his writing gothic, i.m.o.)

However, there are a few outstanding items here that made it a worthwhile read, and most of them were from women. Do women have a greater ability to write in the gothic mode than men? I loved Angela Carter's "The Merchant of Shadows", a witty take on a Sunset Boulevard-esque scenario. Ruth Rendell contributes one of her cold gems, this one a satirical piece about a posh lady who finds herself taking her first ride on a London tube train and beginning to freak out. Emma Tennant (another British female) checks in with "Rigor Beach", a very dark and perverse little number about a black widow-type who lures a man to her apartment, has sex with him, poisons him , and then has a little fun with the corpse. John Edgar Wideman's "Fever", a story I have seen turn up in other anthologies, is a brilliant (and yes, feverish) depiction of a pandemic disease ravaging a city (that might be Philadelphia) in some decade long past. Other good ones were Jamaica Kincaid's wildly creative "Ovando", McGrath's "The Smell" about a puritanical man's obsession with a strange smell in his home, Jeanette Winterson's sketch of a neighborhood oddball, and Scott Bradfield's "Didn't She Know", in which a sexy girl flirts (harmlessly, she thinks) with a bunch of lonely old retirees. Morrow's story about a man who compulsively steals little prized possessions from people was interesting as well.

Some of the other pieces were well-written, but the content did not particularly grab me. Overall this was a mixed bag. I am not sure how much the editors had to work with - I mean, there are a few McGraths and Rendells out there, but is adult gothic fiction really a big field that produces a lot of short stories? Maybe not.

[Lachelle Seville]

Gave this one extra star for the attempt. I saw a few good names as contributors, but only managed to get through Jamaica Kincaid’s story. Meh.

[Mitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very uneven collection of gothic stories.

The first few were experimental writing types, perhaps intending to leave the reader with various impressions rather than anything solid- and I am not a fan of such. Phantom feelings cannot capture my attention for long. In the end I feel as if there is nothing really there.

The writing got a bit more substantial after that but collapsed again at the final story, a Byzantine bit of writing that required repeated resolve to push through to the finish line.

This had the effect of leaving me both disappointed and relieved to set the volume down...and hopeful to find something better to read next.

[David Mahaffey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains one of the creepiest stories I've ever read.

[Lauren George · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the old gothic, writers write to tell a good story. In the New Gothic, writers write to tell readers how clever they are.

Summed up: an anthology containing several stories you suspect require a lot more work to decipher than the stories might actually be worth. Five of these stories were infuriatingly oblique, to the point of unreadability. Some others were competent. A rarer few still, excellent.

Ultimately glad that I pushed through for the goodies which were sprinkled among graduate school level writing: self-indulgent postmodern gibberish upon which readers are tasked with inventing their own meaning. The New Gothic would be improved if its authors took as much pleasure in writing to entertain as they did in exercising their personal demons upon the reading public.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for
“Newton” by Jeanette Winterson
“Blood” by Janice Galloway
“Why Don’t You Come and Live With Me It’s Time” by Joyce Carol Oates
“The Dead Queen” by Robert Coover
“For Dear Life” by Ruth Rendell

And

“The Road to Naděja” by Bradford Morrow, which might be the creepiest short story I’ve ever read.

[Lisbeth Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is mostly the new gothic as "preoccupation with death in today's grim world." The authors are mostly literary, and some of the selections are excerpts from novels. Aside from a magical realist story from Jamaica Kincaid, there is nothing particularly supernatural about them. A decent collection of literary fiction but not interesting if you are looking for horror shorts.

HOWEVER, the short "Fever" by John Edgar Wideman is superb. It's a collage of voices and a bit hard to follow but the details of poverty and death and slavery and history are spectacular. Worth checking out from a library just for that.

[E.A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I only read a few of the stories all the way through (Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, authors I already knew I liked). The taste of this anthology’s editors is very much misaligned with my own. I gave most stories a try, but then gave up on finishing them. I’d rather be reading other things. I’ll give this book away and hope it finds a happier home with someone who loves it.

[The Book Witch · Rating 1 out of 5]

No, I can't.

I tried, I really tried. But these stories they were just weird and confusing and I generally did not know what was going on. It was just such a nightmare to try and work through each story so no. I DNFed this around the 180 mark.

[Vince Darcangelo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faves:
Janice Galloway, "Blood"
Scott Bradfield, "Didn't She Know"
Jeanette Winterson, "Newton"
Angela Carter, "The Merchant of Shadows"

[Laurence · Rating 1 out of 5]

Anthologies are often mixed, this is just misses.

[Brandon Daniels]

Janice Galloway, Blood: 4 - a young girl plays piano after leaving the dentist

[india-mae]

read 'ovando'

[Dirk Grobbelaar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. A bunch of allegories and extracts from novels doth not a short story collection make.

Was this supposed to be a sampler?

Steer clear.

[Kathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very hit and miss collection of stories. Some really good and others down right awful with a number in between.

I recommend
Ovando, Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time, For Dear Life, & Fever

I hated
Horrorday, Blood, The Dead Queen, The Kingdom of Heaven, & J

Everything else I was pretty ambivalent

[Asahi88 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Le uniche storie che salverei sono:

* Sangue
* La Regina Morta
* La Lotta per la vita
* L'Odore

L'altre è meglio lasciarle marcire nell'ignoranza.
(A parte quella della Rice, ma se vi siete già letti Intervista col vampiro non vi perdete niente)
opinione scritta il 21\04\12

[Roniq · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of short gothic stories

[Laurie · Rating 1 out of 5]

2010:

~Blood by Janice Galloway- Okay
~Why Don't You Come Live With Me It's Time by Joyce Carol Oates- Nice & chilling
~J by Kathy Acker- Powerful

[Jecripps]

There are some great, creepy stories in this. Happy Halloween!

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

highlights: Carter, Coover, Galloway, Winterson, Bradfield, Morrow