Shirley Jackson was one of America's most prominent female writers of the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1965 she published one best-selling story collection, six novels, two popular volumes of her family chronicles and many stories, which ranged from fairly conventional tales for the women's magazine market to the ambiguous, allusive, delicately sinister and more obviously literary stories that were closest to Jackson's heart and destined to end up in the more highbrow end of the market. Most critical discussions of Jackson tend to focus on ""The Lottery"" and The Haunting of Hill House. An author of such accomplishment - and one so fully engaged with the pressures and preoccupations of postwar America - merits fuller discussion. To that end, this collection of essays widens the scope of Jackson scholarship with new writing on such works as The Road through the Wall and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and topics ranging from Jackson's domestic fiction to ethics, cosmology, and eschatology. The book also makes newly available some of the most significant Jackson scholarship published in the last two decades.

The Highway Horror Film argues that 'Highway Horror' is a hither-to overlooked sub-genre of the American horror movie. In these films, the American landscape is by its very accessibility rendered terrifyingly hostile, and encounters with other travellers almost always have sinister outcomes.

"A memorable first book of fiction, one which belongs on any shelf of the best contemporary weird tales." - August Derleth, "Chicago Tribune"
" E]xtraordinary . . . gives Mr. Beaumont undeniable stature as an artist." - "N. Y. Herald Tribune"
"Charles Beaumont was a genius . . . and one hell of a storyteller." - Dean R. Koontz
"The name of Charles Beaumont will be honored and recognized for generations yet to come." - Robert Bloch
When "The Hunger and Other Stories" (1957) appeared, it heralded the arrival of Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) as an important and highly original new voice in American fiction. Although he is best known today for his scripts for television and film, including several classic episodes of "The Twilight Zone," Beaumont is being rediscovered as a master of weird tales, and this, his first published collection, contains some of his best. Ranging in tone from the chilling Gothic horror of "Miss Gentilbelle," where an insane mother dresses her son up as a girl and slaughters his pets, to deliciously dark humor in tales like "Open House" and "The Infernal Bouillabaisse," where murderers' plans go disastrously awry, these seventeen stories demonstrate Beaumont's remarkable talent and versatility. This new edition of "The Hunger and Other Stories," the first in more than fifty years, includes a new introduction by Dr. Bernice M. Murphy, who argues for reevaluation of Beaumont alongside the other greats of the genre, including Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Richard Matheson.

"It Came From the 1950s" is an eclectic, witty and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times. The essays explore the emergence of "Hammer Horror" and the company's groundbreaking 1958 adaptation of "Dracula"; the work of popular authors such as Shirley Jackson and Robert Bloch, and the effect that 50s food advertisements had upon the poetry of Sylvia Plath; the place of special effects in the decade's science fiction films; and 1950s Anglo-American relations as refracted through the prism of the 1957 film "Night of the Demon."

This book positions the 'California Gothic' as a highly significant regional subgenre which articulates anxieties specific to the historical, cultural and geographical characteristics of the 'Golden State'. California has long been perceived as a utopian space, but it is also haunted by the spectres of European and Anglo-American imperialism, genocide, racial and economic discrimination, natural disaster and aggressive infrastructural and commercial development. Drawing on the work of California historians and cultural commentators, this study explores the ways in which the nightmarish flipside of the 'California Dream' has been depicted within horror and Gothic.

.During the latter half of the twentieth century the Gothic emerged as one of the liveliest and most significant areas of academic inquiry within literary, film, and popular culture studies. This volume covers the key concepts and developments associated with Twentieth-Century Gothic, tracing the development of the mode from the fin de siecle to 9/11. The eighteen chapters reflect the interdisciplinary and ever-evolving nature of the Gothic, which, during the century, migrated from literature and drama to the cinema and television. The volume has both a chronological and thematic focus and particular attention is paid to topics and themes related to race, identity, marginality and technology. Chapters on ecogothic, Gothic Studies as a discipline, Medical Humanities, Queer Studies, African American Studies and Russian Gothic ensure that the collection is up-to-date and wide-ranging. Suggested further readings at the end of each chapter are intended to facilitate further independent research by readers and researchers.

Horror and Gothic in all of their various forms have penetrated the cultural mainstream in a manner unseen since the last horror boom in mid/late 1970s; even people who would never before have entertained an interest in such dark genres are now happily settling down to watch zombie- and serial killer-related TV shows after the family dinner. This unique collection of 54 short biographical essays, by scholars and experts, brings together a vast array of figures who have played a role in the ever-expanding world of Gothic and Horror. However, you won't find the usual suspects here. Names such as Bram Stoker, Vincent Price, and Stephen King are notably absent. Such titans of terror have received and continue to receive prominent attention in all manner of publications. This collection, instead, focuses on those underrated or overlooked people whom our contributors persuasively argue are deserving of acknowledgement or reappraisal. Stimulatingly eclectic, the essays muse and enthuse on figures as diverse as American singer-songwriter, Tom Waits; British occultist and author, Dion Fortune; American author and scriptwriter, Charles Beaumont; Gallo-Roman historian and Bishop, Gregory of Tours; British gothic novelist and playwright, Francis Lathom; Japanese video game designer, Shinji Mikami; English stage and film actor, Skelton Knaggs; 19th-century Irish novelist, Charlotte Riddell; and Russian-born American experimental filmmaker, Maya Deren. Informative and entertaining, these essays expand, enrich (and, at times, challenge) the boundaries of what we actually define as Gothic and Horror. They celebrate the wide variety of talented individuals whose participation in Gothic and Horror's ongoing evolution has been unjustly overlooked...until now.

An eclectic and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times. 1950s popular culture is analysed by leading scholars and critics such as Christopher Frayling, Mark Jancovich, Kim Newman and David J. Skal.