America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in each of our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories.

In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of the horror genre in the United States, drawing a surprising through-line between the lingering influence of the European Gothic, the enslaved insurrection tales propagated by slaveholders, and the apocryphal chronicles of colonial settlers kidnapped by Native Americans, among many others.

These foundational narratives give rise to and are influenced by the body of work we more closely associate with horror: the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft, the lingering stories of Shirley Jackson, the unsettling films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night tales of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele. From “The Tell-Tale Heart” to M3gan, we begin to see why the horror genre is the perfect prism through which to view America’s past and present.

With the extraordinary historical breadth and dexterous weave of insight and style that has made him twice a finalist for the National Jewish Book, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.

Featuring cameos from:
Shirley Jackson The Sixth Sense Edgar Allan Poe Nathaniel Hawthorne Anne Radcliffe Charles Brockden Brown Los Espookys Washington Irving Nat Turner Night of the Living Dead H.P. Lovecraft Alien Mary Heaton Vorse Edith Wharton Norman Bates Lon Chaney Frankenstein Dracula H.G. Wells William Faulkner Dashiell Hammett Tananarive Due Twilight Zone The Handmaid’s Tale Ray Bradbury I Am Legend Elia Kazan Psycho Ralph Ellison The Blair Witch Project Stanley Kubrick Helter Skelter Jordan Peele The Walking Dead H.H. Holmes Harriet Beecher Stowe