American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond

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 [in] 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. Agent: Daniel Conway, Writers House. (Oct.)