About this item
The most spine-tingling suspense stories from the colonial era - including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft - are presented anew to the contemporary reader.. This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the Colonial eras stifling religion and its dark and threatening woods. Today the best-known tale of Colonial horror is Washington Irvings "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," although Irvings story is probably best-known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors - Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them - are overshadowed by their bestsellers and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for todays reading public. Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary reader, the book will help bring their names - and their work - back from the dead. Featuring stories by Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and many more.
About the Author
Dr Graeme Davis was born 1965 in Kent, UK and educated at Chislehurst & Sidcup Grammar School and the University of St Andrews. He has worked variously as lecturer in English Language & Linguistics and EFL at UK universities. He is an author, academic editor, and researcher as well as Associate Lecturer with The Open University. A specialist in mediaeval language and literature, with interests in the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Iceland, Greenland and the North Atlantic, his writing includes also popular history, popular lexicography and literary criticism of the works of Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and of Dan Brown.
