American Scary
A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
"America is the world's biggest haunted house and American Scary is the only travel guide you need. I loved this book."
—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group
From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele
America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher movie worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories.
In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of horror in the United States. Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we more closely associate with horror today: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the lingering fiction of Shirley Jackson, the disquieting films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night stories of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele.
With the dexterous weave of insight and style that have made him one of America’s leading historians of popular culture, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dauber (American Comics), an American studies professor at Columbia University, provides a meticulous chronicle of the American horror genre across mediums. Dauber discusses how fears of evil spirits are found throughout early American writings, such as English colonizer Mary Rowlandson's 1682 memoir, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, about her kidnapping by Native Americans (whom she viewed as "representatives of the Arch-Deceiver") during King Philip's War. Tracing the emergence of horror fiction, Dauber contends that 18th-century novelist Charles Brockden Brown was the first American author to successfully adapt Gothic fiction to an American setting. Elsewhere, Dauber explores how Bela Lugosi's Dracula movies probed anxieties around the 1910s influenza pandemic's steep death toll, and how Get Out director Jordan Peele aspired to, in his own words, "get the entire audience in touch... with the fears inherent being black in this country." Dauber's broad definition of horror offers a provocative expansion of the genre's pantheon (one chapter focuses on slave narratives and fictional depictions of the antebellum South), even if some of the more atypical examples fail to convince (the assertion that Pac-Man is "essentially a horror story in miniature" strains credulity). The result is an idiosyncratic and largely rewarding take on the genre.
