“In 1790, Andrew Ellicott wrote a ‘Description of the Falls of Niagara’: ‘For about seven miles, up toward Lake Erie…a chasm is formed, which no person can approach without horror… In going up the road near this chasm, the fancy is constantly engaged in the contemplation of the most romantic and awful prospects imaginable.’ ” (p. 37)
I was born and raised in Niagara Falls, a small city on the border with Canada, and over the years plenty of people have jumped into the deadly rapids and gone over the Falls in barrels and other contraptions. Most of them died. Yes, it’s horrable.
Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary is a chronological account of horror in America. Dauber starts with the Puritans and the Salem witch trials. America was horrible to indigenous people and slaves. This led to the brutal Civil War. “When the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment was defeated on the grounds of the aptly named Poison Spring by Arkansas Confederated forces, they didn’t take prisoners: when the Confederates were ordered to move wagons full of supplies they captured, they did so by competing to see who could crush the most heads of wounded and dying Black soldiers under the wheels.” (p. 97)
Dauber analyzes Ambrose Bierce’s “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) with its haunting ending. Dauber also notes that the late 1800s also produced two terms we are all too familiar with today: psychopath and serial killer. The late 1800s also saw a growing interest in ghost stories. One of the best and most famous is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. (p. 119)
Newspapers printed daily stories of gruesome events. As Joseph Pulitzer stated: “If it bleeds, it leads.” From the carnage of World War I, American soldiers returned home and found new horrors in the pages of Weird Tales. Dauber shows how H. P. Lovecraft created a Mythos of cryptic aliens like Cthulhu and mysterious books like The Necronomicon. Lovecraft invited other writers to play in his world and writers like Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber did.
Years later, Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock would shock American audiences with Psycho. Shirley Jackson increased the shock factor with “The Lottery.” Jack Finney freaked out a generation with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ray Bradbury jolted readers with Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Rock music also joined in. The Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967. Around that time, Ray Russell published The Case Against Satan.
Movies of the 1970s like Death Wish and Dirty Harry presented vigilantes who fought the urban horrors. But the book and movie that kicked off an explosion of horror was The Exorcist. The paperback edition of The Exorcist sold over 50 million copies (p. 284).
The writer that transformed the horror market was lucky his wife fished a manuscript Stephen King had been struggling with out of the wastebasket (p. 294) and Carrie fueled an unprecedented writing career for the man from Maine.
“After the success of writers like King, Straub, Beatty, Tyron, and Levin between hard covers, a whole cottage industry of paperback originals sprung up starting in the seventies…” (p. 327) Bill Crider wrote several horror novels. So did Anne Rice. It may have been Rice’s An Interview With a Vampire, especially the 1994 movie version, that inspired a quirky movie and TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (p. 335)
Now we have to survive a new horror, a second Trump Presidency. American Scary can help us get through the next four years. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: Red, White, and Black — ix
One: In the Hands of God and the Devil — 1
Two: New Country, Old Bones — 37
Three: When America’s Rivers Ran with Blood — 86
Four: Gaslights and Shadows — 127
Five: In the Shadow of the Jet Age’s Gleam — 185
Six: Revolutions and Chainsaws — 230
Seven: Weird Tales — 302
Eight: Cards from a Haunted Tarot Deck — 361
Acknowledgements — 419
Endnotes — 423
Index — 457
