Remember the fantastic ghost stories of childhood? Reach back far enough and you’ll find those tales spool back to when cavemen sat around the fire at night, whispering stories while the stars fell.

They’re “cool winds and wood smoke” stories, as novelist Peter Straub says, and all cultures have them, need them.

For as long as there’s been storytelling, there’s been the scary story — macabre, sci-fi unexplainables, tingling horror, nightmarish mysteries, the uncanny, the fantastic. From Edgar Allan Poe to newbie Benjamin Percy, the Gothic in American literature remains vibrant, attracting legions of readers.

Now, finally, we have a new collection.

In the fall, The Library of America will recognize this most American of genres with a historical two-volume anthology that brings together the best of the genre in selections by Straub, who edited the volumes.

Here, in the 85 stories in the set, are some of America’s finest literary names.

The first volume, “American Fantastic Tales Terror and the Uncanny: From Poe to the Pulps,” is a survey of a century and half of fantastic storytelling — 44 stories covering a period from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century. The second volume, “American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny: From the 1940s to Now,” begins in 1940 and showcases contemporary writers — Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Steven Millhauser — who have explored new styles and subjects, pushing the genre’s envelope till it began to seep into the mainstream.

The early days are represented by Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Washington Irving. The Victorian and Edwardian eras bring Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And then, with the pulps, come H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather and others.

“Let us at least take note that loss, grief, and terror echo throughout the two volumes of ‘American Fantastic Tales,'” Straub says in his introduction.

Straub, himself the author of 14 novels and the winner of several Fantasy awards, explains that “fiction of this kind, at least in the form seen here, emerged as an expression of the universal sense of loss, grief and terror produced by the gradual replacement of the Enlightenment’s orderly, rational, reassuring world-view with the unstable and untrustworthy universe that came into being during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Noting the long history of the fantastic, Straub says: “Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke.”

Take Mary Wilkins Freeman’s 1902 story, “Luella Miller.” You’re hooked from the opening line: “Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt.”

The story relates how everyone who loved Luella Miller or came into close contact with her ended up weakening and dying. Though the story offers no real explanation or conclusion, you become hauntingly certain that this is a tale about a vampire. Or is it? Oh, but you feel it, an uncanny sense of doom — cool winds and wood smoke.

And then, in the 1889 “His Unconquerable Enemy,” W.C. Morrow weaves a chilling tale of murder, cruel punishment and revenge in the court of a rajah in the heart of India. A

Among the best is Benjamin Percy’s 2007 “Dial Tone,” the last story in the two-volume set. Percy opens the piece with a body hanging from a cell phone tower. The narrator is a telemarketer, who is abused and sworn at by “bodiless voices that snarl with hatred” at the other end of the phone. What does that do to a person who hears the hatred day after day after day? Does he, must he, turn to murder?

Ah, yes, you can hear the cool winds and wood smoke of ancient storytellers in these anthologies.