A fearful nation

One of the most influential courses I took while in college was Gothic Literature, taught by my then-professor, now-friend/mentor Dr. Brett Cox, in which he ran through the history of horror fiction by looking at works by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Joe Hill, amongst others. I'd never been much of a horror fan before that – I'd read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe's work as a teenager, but not much beyond that. The course awakened a new interest for me: Prof. Cox really emphasized that the horrific events and actions at the center of the stories weren't always the point: it was the atmosphere, environment, and the ways that the authors interpreted the world that were really important.

I've read a small share of horror since, and a new book brought the memories of what I learned in that class flooding back: American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond by Jeremy Dauber. Dauber's the author of another excellent genre history, American Comics: A History, and in that book, I found an excellent survey of the genre that went far beyond the confines that a genre provides to try and explain the wider influences that buffered the direction that it's taken. With American Scary, he takes much the same approach, and in doing so, makes a compelling argument that America's tradition of horror fiction is rooted in our own inequities and the real-world horrors that are part of the country's foundation.

Dauber kicks off the book by looking back at the country's early years: exploring the arrival of European colonizers and how they confronted the dark woods of North America with trepidation. Those Puritanical founders found plenty to be frightened of, whether it was from the notion that they were doomed to hell or the threat of attacks from indigenous Americans. These conditions helped reinforce the idea that they were surrounded by a frightful world, and that in order to survive, they'd have to take desperate measures. Early examples of that are familiar incidents like the Salem Witch trials. People being singled or cast out of their communities, Dauber argues, is a foundational part of this larger canon, and it's those experiences that not only provide plenty of inspiration for horror authors, but also the thought process that's been continually running under the hood.

Another essential influence, Dauber argues, is the country's original sin: slavery. He points to some of the obvious influences: the brutality of the practice, the violence inflicted against those held in captivity, how it as an institution dragged the nation into war. In doing so, he points to an overarching component: the fear that it instilled in the country writ-large. The anxiety of the Southern whites who feared the consequences of these practices, the fear imparted by slave catchers, of those being torn away from their homes and families, and the apocalyptic horrors that industrialized warfare inflicted on the lands and bodies of the people involved.

Zooming out further, slavery and the war fought over it is part of a much larger picture: the South's economy depended on the practice because it made those industries ever more profitable. Capitalism, Dauber argues, provides the conditions for no shortage of everyday horrors. He makes a point that resonated with me: "perhaps the most omnipresent horror, in those first decades of the century, was the explosion of an industrial capitalism that chewed up waves of workers, Hawthorne's Notebooks on steam engine-steroids."

Along the way, these horrors influenced plenty of early writers – not just genre practitioners like Poe, but the writers at publications like Harpers and The Atlantic, who were watching and reporting on the changes that the nation was undergoing. The modernizing world brought with it plenty of new things to be fearful of: industrial processes that spat out rancid and toxic food, poisoned landscapes, outsiders from strange countries, and "immoral" arts and behaviors that challenged the established norms.

Along the way, Dauber runs through the works (fictional and non) that was being produced along the way: everything from Poe's "Cask of Amontillado," to Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and more. This isn't an exhaustive, year-by-year examination: it's an eminently readable book that doesn't get bogged down in minutia and rabbit holes, and as such, the first half of this book is a good overview of the foundations of the modern horror genre.

Dauber pivots a bit in the second half of the book. He still keeps a close eye on the larger, horrific events that define the real world, like the First and Second World Wars, the tensions of the Cold War, the red scare, Reaganomics, and other notable influences that continued to nudge a more defined "horror" genre in various directions. But he also looks at how the modern genre takes shape, not just in novels and short stories, but across film and television as well, pointing to the rise of Hollywood and the adaptations of classic stories like Frankenstein and Dracula as major touch-points that helped influence how we saw horror, running up all the way to the modern day with streaming services and the proliferation of cheap-but-super-popular horror films that rule theaters when fall comes around.

In many ways, American Scary isn't just a history of horror fiction and storytelling: it's an examination of our nation's flaws, our fears, and our anxieties, and how scary stories are one of the ways that we collectively address them. There are plenty of those problems to be addressed, and if history is anything to go by, there'll be plenty to influence and inspire the next generations of horror creators in the years and decades to come.