2021 Bram Stoker Awards(R) Nominee for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction From the short story "The Lottery" to the masterworks The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson's popular, often bestselling works experimented with popular generic forms (melodrama, folktale, horror, the Gothic, and the Weird) to create a uniquely apocalyptic vision of America and its contradictions. With a Foreword by award-winning Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, this collection features comprehensive critical engagement with Jackson's works, including those that have received less scholarly attention. Among these are the novels The Road Through the Wall, The Bird's Nest, and Hangsaman, as well as Jackson's historical study, The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Also included are essays on Jackson's darkly humorous collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, on Stephen King's "literary friendship" with Jackson, on the little-known film adaptations Lizzie (1957) and Hosszu Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jackson's unpublished satirical cartoon sketches. The collection's five sections focus on Jackson's style, key themes, and influence; her politics and poetics of space; her treatment of the "monstrous" mother and monstrousness of motherhood; her representations of outsiders and minorities; and moving-image adaptations of her work.

Tobe Hooper's productions, which often trespassed upon the safety of the family unit, cast a critical eye toward an America in crisis. Often dismissed by scholars and critics as a one-hit wonder thanks to his 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper nevertheless was instrumental in the development of a robust and deeply political horror genre from the 1960s until his death in 2017. In American Twilight, the authors assert that the director was an auteur whose works featured complex monsters and disrupted America's sacrosanct perceptions of prosperity and domestic security. American Twilight focuses on the skepticism toward American institutions and media and the articulation of uncanny spaces so integral to Hooper's vast array of feature and documentary films, made-for-television movies, television episodes, and music videos. From Egg Shells (1969) to Poltergeist (1982), Djinn (2013), and even Billy Idol's music video for "Dancing with Myself" (1985), Tobe Hooper provided a singular directorial vision that investigated masculine anxiety and subverted the idea of American exceptionalism.

The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection revises, reframes, and deconstructs persistent critical binaries that have been put in place by scholarly discourse to label 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a "classical" period or "canonical" mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios. The book's four sections re-evaluate the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors informing 1940s horror cinema to introduce new theoretical frameworks and to open up space for scholarly discussion of 1940s horror genre hybridity, periodization, and aesthetics. Chapters focused on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in forties horror cinema, 1940s proto-slasher films, the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios, and critical reevaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire's Ghost (1945) and "slippery" auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield, work to recover a decade of horror that has been framed as having fallen victim to repetition, exhaustion, and decline.