Jesse's Reviews > American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond

I'd been excited to read this for a while, since I quite enjoyed his books on comics and Sholom Aleichem, which, I dunno, may be one of the more broadly different three-book achievements in a while, especially for an academic. There's a lot here that's familiar if you've read in the field, and toward the end he seems to be getting a little tired--a large number of products are referred to as "brilliant" in the last section, possibly too many of them. On the other hand, this is really the first history of horror that I'd call as much intellectual history as cultural history; he's alive to how tropes of possession, ghosts, zombies, etc. can crop up in discussions of the onset of the machine, or a captivity narrative, or journalism about AIDS, or 50s psychology. As such, he can move back and forth among novels and short fiction (not to mention dipping into slick-magazine fiction's engagement with and invocation of these notions), film, and various kinds of nonfiction that all make the essential point--which verges on new-historicist--about how broadly useful monsters and monstrosity have been to think with.

The earlier material feels more original to me, especially his discussions of the lingering afterlives of Salem (who was at fault here, and how does your ascription of blame tie into your theories of the world?) and the Civil War, and the use of the supernatural to capture something of the feel of the gilded-age city; there's a neat section on western writers' use of racist tropes about Asian Americans when describing gaslight San Francisco, for instance, and discussions of books you wouldn't expect here, like Crane's Maggie.

Later, sure, you're got a lot of what you'd expect: HPL and Shirley Jackson and Stephen King and Anne Rice and vampires-and-sex and zombies-and-capitalism. (Also, that weird brief werewolf renaissance in the early 80s.) But also some neat segues--the argumentative construction here is quite artful, which I suppose it had better be, given the length and density of a book with over 400pp of text that has so few chapters. So, for instance, there's a neat little return-of-the-repressed bit about the trope of "Indian burial grounds" as an explanation in the 80s, with a discussion of its at-best ambiguous political ramifications, which segues into a discussion of Native writers like Erika T. Wurth and Stephen Graham Jones. Also, he's great on both short-story writers everyone has read (Bradbury), some people have read (Bloch), and those only genre nerds read (Charles Beaumont, say, or old John Collier, or Anthony Boucher's WWII weird fiction).

Which of course meant that I had to control myself before I ordered too many books by people I might have read some of, or read years ago, or not at all. I did OK with that. Not great, tbh, but OK. Would definitely use this to teach a class, assuming I could get enough students to take it.