American Gothic Short Stories from Flame Tree Publishing – Non-Spoiler Book Review

Howdy, howdy, my name is John, and this video is 
a review of the book American Gothic Short Stories  
published by Flame Tree Publishing. This book is 
a collection of short stories in the Gothic style  
by American authors, and it ranges from 
stories that are first published in this volume  
to stories that are much older. A lot 
of these stories from older authors  
are stories that may not be well known for in 
their own right, but they’re by authors that  
have published much more famous works. 
There’s a total of 53 stories in this volume,  
plus there’s a forward, and then a brief biography 
of all of the authors at the end of the book.  
In my opinion, there were six of the stories 
that deserve five stars. 22 of the stories  
were four star stories. Another 22 were three 
star stories. There were three two star stories,  
and then there were zero one star stories. After 
I averaged out all of the rankings it came in just  
over 3.5, so I went ahead and gave it a four star 
rating on Goodreads. I’m going to provide a full  
list of the short stories and their star rating 
in the description. Now I want to talk about the  
six stories

that I gave five stars to. The first 
one is titled Stone Baby and it’s by Terri Bruce.  
This story really impressed me because it 
successfully put me into the shoes of someone  
I will never be, a pregnant woman. In this story 
a woman loses her baby, and in medical terms a  
stone baby is a baby that a woman has miscarried, 
but stays in the womb and then becomes calcified,  
and if left in the womb it can prevent future 
pregnancies. This story follows a young woman  
who has had such an event, and follows her 
as she contemplates the surgery to remove  
the fetus. The next five star story is A Good Man 
Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. I do need  
to warn you about this story in particular, and 
several of the other stories. They do use racially  
insensitive language in their stories. If you can 
put that aside, the main character in this story  
is a grandmother, and she is going with her son, 
daughter-in-law, and their children on a vacation  
and this story I think very perfectly captures 
a stereotypical American family that is set  
when the story was written in the mid (19)50s. 
The next five star story is TheTell-Tale Heart  
by Edgar Allan Poe. This is a story I of course 
originally read in school, and it’s a classic.  
This collection does contain 
one other Edgar Allan Poe story  
and I did not find that one as interesting as 
TheTell-Tale Heart. The next five star story is  
Approaching Lavender by Lucy A. Snyder. In this 
story the main character is a young woman who is a  
newlywed, and she’s married to a man with kind of 
traditional views of marriage. She has a regular  
day job and then she paints in her spare time. 
Her husband asks her to paint a self-portrait. The  
next five star story is Amazing Patsy by Valerie 
B. Williams. This story follows a grandmother  
and her granddaughter. The daughter is no longer 
living at this point. All the women in this family  
have a magical ability. The grandmother teaches 
the granddaughter how to use it. The last five  
star story is Hollow Tree by Nemma Wollenfang. In 
this story, the main character is a young woman  
who is murdered by her husband, and her body is 
stuffed inside a hollow tree. She is then able  
to watch as her husband repeats this process. 
She is able to befriend the women who have also  
suffered the same fate. I was really pleased 
with the selection of stories in this book.  
It was a little bit difficult for me to switch 
from story to story. I’m a little bit more used to  
reading novels, where, you know, you can sit and 
follow a story for a much longer period of time,  
but if you’re in the market for some short 
stories of Gothic fantasy, this is a good  
one to check out. Thank you for watching this 
video and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

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