On October 15 Scott Poole’s new book goes on sale just in time for the Halloween season. It is titled Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Baylor University Press, 2011):
Salem witches, frontier wilderness beasts, freak show oddities, alien invasions, Freddie Krueger. From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity.
Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous “other” not only reflects society’s fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.
Poole discusses aspects of this great book in TheoFantastique Podcast 2.6. You can order your copy of Monsters in America through the TheoFantastique Store.
This is a fantastic book. I’ll definitely use it as a key text should I ever get a chance to teach a course on horror films. I’m participating in a roundtable review/discussion of it through Patheos starting monday.