Gothic fiction by more than 40 known and unknown writers. They range from William Sansom's A Woman Seldom Found, on an encounter in Rome between a man and a woman, to Paul Bowle's Allal, on an Arab boy who switches bodies with a snake.

"A William Abrahams book."

From Wieland, or, The transformation / Charles Brockden Brown -- The legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving -- The man of adamant / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The Tartarus of maids / Herman Melville -- The black cat / Edgar Allan Poe -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- The romance of certain old clothes / Henry James -- The damned thing / Ambrose Bierce -- Afterward / Edith Wharton -- The striding place / Gertrude Atherton -- Death in the woods / Sherwood Anderson -- The outsider / H.P. Lovecraft -- A rose for Emily / William Faulkner -- The lonesome place / August Derleth -- The door / E.B. White -- The lovely house / Shirley Jackson -- Allal / Paul Bowles -- The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- In the icebound hothouse / William Goyen -- The enormous radio / John Cheever -- The veldt / Ray Bradbury -- The Dachau shoe / W.S. Merwin -- The approved / W.S. Merwin -- Spiders I have known / W.S. Merwin -- Postcards from the Maginot Line / W.S. Merwin -- Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams / Sylvia Plath -- In bed one night / Robert Coover -- Schrödinger's cat / Ursula K. Le Guin -- The waterworks / E.L. Doctorow -- Shattered like a glass goblin / Harlan Ellison -- Human moments in World War III / Don DeLillo -- The anatomy of desire / John L'Heureux -- Little things / Raymond Carver -- The temple / Joyce Carol Oates -- Freniere (from Interview with the Vampires) / Anne Rice -- A short guide to the city / Peter Straub -- In the penny arcade / Steven Millhauser -- The reach / Stephen King -- Exchange value / Charles Johnson -- Snow / John Crowley -- The last feast of Harlequin / Thomas Ligotti -- Time and again / Breece D'J Pancake -- Replacements / Lisa Tuttle -- Spirit seizures / Melissa Pritchard -- Cat in glass / Nancy Etchemendy -- The girl who loved animals / Bruce McAllister -- Ursus Triad, later / Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg -- (from Geek Love) The nuclear family: his talk, her teeth / Katherine Dunn -- Subsoil / Nicholson Baker.