An indispensable resource for students and researchers of paranormal myth and media, this book explores the undead and unholy in literature, film, television, and popular culture. Following an introduction to frightful manifestations in media, sections address ghosts, vampires, and monsters individually, and each section includes a broad consideration of the ghost, vampire or monster in American culture.
The section dedicated to ghosts examines the "spectral turn" of popular culture and the ghost's relation to justice and mourning, with particular attention to Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. In the vampires section, the author considers the undead bloodsucker's relationship to anti-Semitism, suicide, and cinema. The third section discusses monsters in relation to topics such as global pandemics, terrorism, mass shootings, "stranger danger," and social otherness, with attention to a range of popular culture texts including the films IT and It Follows.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is a professor of English at Central Michigan University and an associate book review editor with the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has published 28 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on horror, fantasy, science fiction, and American literature and culture. Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.

Table of Contents


Introduction: Monstrous Musings

Act I: Ghosts

The American Ghost Story

Introduction: The Spectral Turn

Doing Justice to Bartleby

Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph

Act II: Vampires

American Vampires

The Vampire Cinema

Circumcising Dracula

Vampire Suicide

Act III: Monsters

American Monsters

Introduction: A Genealogy of Monster Theory

Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture

What Is IT? Ambient Dread and Modern Paranoia in It (2017), It Follows (2014), and It Comes at Night (2017)

Index