John Demos is one of my favorite historians, and I will read pretty much anything by him I can find. This is, as the subtitle says, "a brief history oJohn Demos is one of my favorite historians, and I will read pretty much anything by him I can find. This is, as the subtitle says, "a brief history of witch-hunting," starting with the Martyrs of Lyons in A.D. 177 and ending with the Fells Acre Day School child abuse panic in 1984. Demos does a great job of synthesizing a LOT of material and combing out the commonalities between, say, the Malleus Maleficarum and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But I'm left wondering uneasily when the next witch-hunt will come along, or if Twitter and other social media make the half-life of a witch-hunt so brief that they're blossoming and dying all the time now.
This is a comprehensive discussion of American novels, from the first novel written in America (The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, 1789This is a comprehensive discussion of American novels, from the first novel written in America (The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, 1789)---before that, actually, since he starts talking about novels with Clarissa (1748)---up to the current productions in the 60s. It is engaging and entertaining, and I do genuinely feel I learned a good deal from it.
However, it has major drawbacks. Fiedler is enlightened for 1966, but---while he admits that (white) women and Black men write novels, and is even enthusiastic about Invisible Man---it never occurs to him that either (white) women or Black men have subject positions (and Black women do not exist). He completely falls for Humbert Humbert's story in Lolita, and never questions that OF COURSE a twelve-year-old girl seduced him and OF COURSE HH is the injured party. And he is quite unnecessarily catty about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," calling it an "unwitting travesty" of the American adaptation of Kafka by writers like Nathanael West and Isaac Rosenfeld (492). In general, he suffers greatly from the idea that literature should be divvied up into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow (with such gradations on the scale as "upper middlebrow," which is where I stopped being annoyed and just became amused by his posturing). Only highbrow literature is worth consideration and highbrow literature is, of course, only written by men. (George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans would get a pass, I think. But, being English, she does not get discussed.) The vast audience of novel-reading women merely serve to drag potentially highbrow male authors down to their middlebrow level. He is dismissive of science fiction, and detective fiction after Poe, and although he clearly loves the gothic, he only loves it if it remains pure and does not debase itself with what he calls "horror-pornography."
It is also notable and instructive that I do not recognize the names of most of the (white male) writers he mentions after WWII....more
This is an anthology of essays, arranged chronologically by subject, that talk about, in the broadest possible senses of the words, "hauntings," "ghosThis is an anthology of essays, arranged chronologically by subject, that talk about, in the broadest possible senses of the words, "hauntings," "ghosts," "phantoms," etc. Most of the essays are 2nd tier; their subjects are interesting enough, but the writing is no more than get-the-job-done passable. (And I think the one essay is wrong about Christine---Christine is sort of the opposite of a ghost, in that she is intensely physical and one of the things the book is very uneasily about is the fact that her physicality is inexorably self-repairing, you can't get rid of the physical 1958 Plymouth Fury, no matter what you do; although I think it's fair to say she is also haunted, the two phenomena shouldn't be elided, and she certainly shouldn't be described as a "ghost-car"---and very possibly wrong about From a Buick 8, but that's based only on the description of the book in the essay, so.) The two I thought were the best as pieces of writing as well as academic essays were 1 about the phenomenon of "hysterical fugues" in 19th century America and the academic genealogy of what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (like I said, the concept of "haunting" is being stretched to its utmost limits) and 1 called "The Politics of Heaven: The Ghost Dance, The Gates Ajar, and Captain Stormfield," which I'm finding a little difficult to explain, except that it's about depictions of Heaven in late 19th century America.
(Yes, I did notice that I spent the most time in this review talking about Christine.)
So, yes, this was written in 1982, but I still found that it had interesting and useful things to say.
Modleski talks about three kinds of stories aimeSo, yes, this was written in 1982, but I still found that it had interesting and useful things to say.
Modleski talks about three kinds of stories aimed at women: Harlequin romances, Gothic novels (Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Wheatley style Gothic), and soap operas. And I think her basic question is, why do women want to read/watch things that are so formulaic? She quotes Harlequin's rules for its writers and explores how the formula plays out in ways that are both satisfying and unsatisfying---meaning that you always want to read another one because this one didn't quite scratch the itch; she talks about the validation of paranoia in Gothics and the way the story they tell about marriage is very different from the story the Harlequins tell about courtship; she discusses the intentionally never-ending structure of soap operas and the way that they're designed for a distracted audience (a middle-class housewife, who's cleaning and cooking and the baby may wake up from its nap at any moment). I remember watching soap operas at my babysitter's house as a little kid, and Modleski explains for me WHY the narrative jumps so quickly from character to character and WHY none of the stories ever seems to get anywhere.
She is mildly Freudian, by which I mean she uses Freud, but uses him non-programatically, taking the bits that are helpful and leaving the bits that are unhelpful on the floor. And I think her use of Freud assists her argument because it enables her to talk about the deep structures beneath, say, the Harlequin rule that all novels must be written in third-person.
I'm sure, 40 years on, that other people have written other literary criticism of these forms, and I will probably find some of them as I continue to read about Gothic novels (in the broader sense in which The Shining is a Gothic novel, which it totally is). But Modleski's monograph (140 pages including notes and index) is sharply intelligent and clearly written, and it gave me a way of looking at its subjects that I hadn't had before.
Brief biographies of 41 women writers, from Margaret Cavendish to Jewelle Gomez, who wrote/write horror (and/or speculative fiction, but mostly horrorBrief biographies of 41 women writers, from Margaret Cavendish to Jewelle Gomez, who wrote/write horror (and/or speculative fiction, but mostly horror). Tone is chatty (I was not surprised to learn that the authors also have a podcast), but I never quite felt like the subject matter was being dumbed down. Certainly, if you are interested in learning about the history of horror written by women, this is a great book to start with....more
(I had it on my TBR list anyway, but then Stephen Graham Jones used a quote from it as the epigraph for My Heart Is a ChainsaThis is such a good book.
(I had it on my TBR list anyway, but then Stephen Graham Jones used a quote from it as the epigraph for My Heart Is a Chainsaw---and there's a whole 'nother post about how SGJ uses Men, Women, and Chain Saws in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, about the difference between what Jade thinks the Final Girl is and what the book thinks the Final Girl is---so I bumped it up the list and I am Not Sorry.)
It's an academic analysis of gender in 70s and 80s horror movies. It is well-written, thoughtful, clearly very fond of its subject matter, and not afraid to innovate. Not only does Clover say here is what horror movies do with gender, she goes a step further and says, here is how we can think about what horror movies do with gender. Her idea of the Final Girl has crossed the boundary into pop culture, where it is of course misused, but that, the identification of patterns within the genre, is the kind of work the book is doing. There's a creative component to her analysis that is very often lacking in academic books and that I enjoyed a great deal.
I don't watch horror movies (not because I don't love horror, but because I find jumpscares distressing rather than fun), so I think the only one of the movies she talks about that I've seen is Aliens, but that did not make me enjoy the book less. She tells you enough about the movies to follow what she's saying without bogging herself down in plot retellings. When she does discuss the plot, as in her lengthy discussion of I Spit on Your Grave, it's because the movie's plot is how it talks about gender.
I think you probably have to be interested in horror in some fashion to really dig this book---although it is extremely astute and thoughtful about gender as well, if you are interested in the now outdated two-gender model---but it might also be of interest to people who are interested in how a genre is a discussion between texts, because the movies she's talking about are a great example.
This is, of course, out of date, but it is a good overview of how women were treated (and how they behaved) under the Nazis. I admit that I wanted somThis is, of course, out of date, but it is a good overview of how women were treated (and how they behaved) under the Nazis. I admit that I wanted something more in depth---so I will be looking for more books about women in Nazi Germany---but Stephenson covers a LOT of ground in a relatively short book.
She talks about women mostly on urban/rural and working class/middle class axes (upper class women are not mentioned at all), and she definitely is talking about sets of women with examples from individual women's experiences, rather than the book being ABOUT individual women's experiences. If that makes any sense....more
So, fair warning, what Bergland is interested in is not so much GHOSTS as it is the rhetorical trope of, as she puts it, "spectralizing Indians." ThisSo, fair warning, what Bergland is interested in is not so much GHOSTS as it is the rhetorical trope of, as she puts it, "spectralizing Indians." This is a trope that is EVERYWHERE in American discourse about Native Americans, first from white writers & speakers imagining that Indians are vanishing (or have vanished), and then from Native writers & speakers, turning the trope right back around at the whites. Bergland's evidence is lying around on the ground to be picked up, and she does a good, solid, persuasive job of making her argument about 18th and 19th century authors. (She talks only briefly about 20th century authors and then only about Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony and The Almanac of the Dead) and Stephen King (Pet Sematary).) But she's really not interested in stories, except insofar as they demonstrate the trope (she spends a lot of time, for example, with Fenimore Cooper). Which---it is not her problem that what I was hoping for was an analysis of ghost stories, or at least some interest in the ghost as a figure rather than just the specter as a trope....more
Lit crit is as prone to trends and fads as any other human endeavor, but the thing about good literary criticism is that it doesn't go out of date. ThLit crit is as prone to trends and fads as any other human endeavor, but the thing about good literary criticism is that it doesn't go out of date. The two essays in this collection that were great were great; the rest ranged from good to boring to my GOD that's a lot of Lacan. And the one essay I deeply disliked that was so busy disapprovingly theorizing the discourse about serial killers that it forgot that the victims were real people, too. I mean, theorize Ted Bundy all you want, but don't forget about Kimberly Leach.
Maggie Kilgour's essay, "Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud," was a wide-ranging assessment of the gothic and its tropes that spends most of its time with The Silence of the Lambs. (Which, of COURSE it's gothic, how could it not be?) Kim Ian Michasiw's essay, "Some Stations of Suburban Gothic," aside from not being afraid to be funny, was a really interesting use of theory (unlike the crop of Lacanians). I'm not sure I entirely understood it---if you asked me the difference between a "station" and a "locale," I don't think I could tell you, except that stations are given to you/imposed on you by the social order; a locale is something you make for yourself---but I WANTED to. I may in fact go reread it and see if I can get my brain to wrap around the theory a little better.
I have a private list on Amazon called "gothic." It's so long now that I can't remember what's on it....more
Specifically in the subtitle he means American women between 1850 and 1930, when apparently there was this enormous output of ghost stories by AmericaSpecifically in the subtitle he means American women between 1850 and 1930, when apparently there was this enormous output of ghost stories by American female authors. One of the OTHER things I learned in reading this book is how many American female authors of this period there were that I had never even heard of. These are women who were prolific and who enjoyed tremendous critical and popular success during their own lifetimes but who somehow just...got erased. I had heard, of course, of Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Harriet Prescott Spofford, Anna M. Hoyt, Madeline Yale Wynne, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Helen Hull, and Gertrude Atherton? (And those are only the women whose stories Weinstock discusses.) It's a truism, often trotted out---or at least it was when I was getting my degrees, lo these mumblecough years ago---that 90% of Victorian fiction was unremarkable: popular disposable fiction. But I wonder to what degree that "unremarkable" meant either "fiction by women" or "supernatural fiction"---both of which were sneered at by the academy for most of the twentieth century---or both.
I am not original in wondering this, I know. But wow.
This is a book of academic criticism, so it's a little dry. It is, however, readable rather than suffocated beneath the weight of its own critical jargon, and I found the subject fascinating. (Possibly, full disclaimer, because I am also a female writer of ghost stories.) Weinstock argues that American women writers between 1850 and 1930 used supernatural fiction as a vehicle/stalking horse for discussions and/or critiques of the ideology of women's roles in Victorian and Edwardian society, particularly motherhood; the failings of capitalism; lesbian desire; and the Gothic written by men. I particularly liked his reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Giant Wisteria" as a critique of The Scarlet Letter....more
First, a warning: it is very 1965 in this book. There's only one racist joke, but the misogyny is everywhere, both in Swain's assumption that all charFirst, a warning: it is very 1965 in this book. There's only one racist joke, but the misogyny is everywhere, both in Swain's assumption that all characters and writers are male by default, and in the off-hand treatment of wife-beating. He's also writing for a market environment that largely isn't there anymore.
Second: for most of the book, Swain is laying out the formula that he says will result in "good" stories. (I put "good" in quotation marks because I'm not sure Swain and I agree on what a good story is.) His formula is a successful one (I recognize it in the Marvel movies, for example), but it is definitely a formula and it only really leads to writing the one kind of story. (Swain thinks there IS only one kind of story.) It's like a recipe, and the recipe for Key Lime Pie is all well and good unless what you're hankering for is German Black Forest Cake. Or beignets.
Third: and then at the end he goes and offers some really good practical advice about being a writer and motivating yourself to work and things like that, and that part is both insightful and useful.
So Kathryn Harrison is famous (or notorious) mostly for writing a book about her affair with her father, which I mention because that's the angle fromSo Kathryn Harrison is famous (or notorious) mostly for writing a book about her affair with her father, which I mention because that's the angle from which she comes at this book. It isn't a memoir, but it is absolutely NOT free of Harrison's personal history of familial trauma. Sometimes this feels relevant and meaningful; sometimes this feels like Harrison intruding herself into the story of Jody and Billy Gilley.
In 1984, Billy Gilley beat his father, his mother, and his little sister to death with a baseball bat. He did it, he claimed, in order to free his sister Jody and himself from the abuse of their parents. (He claims his little sister's death was a sort of accident: she started screaming and he panicked.) Harrison wants there to be an incestuous love story between Billy and Jody, because that's the baggage she brings to the table, but she's honest enough to admit that there isn't. Billy may (or may not) have been "in love" with Jody; Jody was definitely not "in love" with him; Jody was frightened of and repulsed by him. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that yes indeed, Bill and Linda Gilley were emotionally abusive, sometimes physically abusive.
The most interesting part of the book is the comparisons Harrison does between what Billy says and what Jody says, both about the night of the murders and about their lives leading up to that night, the way that, with Jody's help, she picks Billy's story apart (for example, Jody says that Billy was molesting her, not protecting her from their father) so that as readers we can see the weird mix of truth and untruth in Billy's story. Also the way that both Jody and Billy change between the court records in 1984 and the interviews in 2008.
I came away from the book feeling that the Gilleys died because Billy was what their abuse made him and because they refused to see what they had made. And because all the institutions and organizations that are supposed to protect children failed to take Billy away from his parents.
As you will not be surprised to learn, given the title and my reading proclivities, this is the story of an Angel of Death serial killer, a man named As you will not be surprised to learn, given the title and my reading proclivities, this is the story of an Angel of Death serial killer, a man named Charles Cullen who in his sixteen year career as a nurse killed an unknown number of people, but somewhere between 40 and 400. He should have been stopped after the first 5 at the most, but the hospitals he worked for consistently played how can we make ourselves not liable? rather than how can we stop the serial killer working for us? Which says nothing good about the American health care system.
Graeber paints a picture of a deeply unhappy and mostly dysfunctional human being who killed for reasons that Graeber takes a stab at articulating, but that really nobody knows. Probably including Cullen.
Cullen is a noteworthy Angel of Death serial killer because after he was arrested, his ex-girlfriend's mother approached him on the wild off-chance that he might be willing to donate a kidney to her son (his ex-girlfriend's brother). He was willing and he was a perfect match, and several people had to move heaven and go through hell to actually make it happen. It's an act of altruism that makes no sense against Cullen's random murders (although Cullen himself seems to view his murders as things he did---he's not denying his guilt---but as things that have nothing to do with him personally). But he did it....more
The title does accurately encapsulate the contents of the book, a series of mini-essays on American houses in which murder has taken place (or is beliThe title does accurately encapsulate the contents of the book, a series of mini-essays on American houses in which murder has taken place (or is believed to have taken place, since he's got a couple houses in New Orleans where there was no murder, no matter what people say). There were some houses on the list I hadn't heard of, although he also hit many of the famous ones (and of course the house on the cover is the Amityville Horror house---which WAS the site of a mass murder, even if the Lutzes faked the haunting). He provides brief histories of the houses post-homicide, whether they've sold, how much they've sold for, are they open to the public (a few of them have been turned into museums, although the murders that happened there are not why Taliesin can be toured). Unfortunately, Lehto is not a very good writer. While his material is fascinating, his writing is dull and badly repetitive and, honestly, not very deeply researched. I checked the book out of the library hoping he might have something interesting to say about Lizzie Borden's house, but he did not....more
This is the book that people try and try and try to write and fail.
It is both an intelligent and thoughtful true crime book AND an intelligent and thoThis is the book that people try and try and try to write and fail.
It is both an intelligent and thoughtful true crime book AND an intelligent and thoughtful memoir, and the two things are intertwined with each other so complexly that, no, there is no way Marzano-Lesnevich could have written one without the other.
The true crime thread of the book is about the murder of a six-year-old boy, Jeremy Guillory, by a twenty-six year old convicted pedophile, Ricky Langley. The memoir thread is about Alex Marzano-Lesnevich growing up in a family that would not acknowledge that they and their sisters were being sexually abused by their grandfather. (I am following the pronoun preference shown in their bio on their website.) Both sides of the book are more complicated than that, and that's one of the things the book is about.
Marzano-Lesnevich is an excellent writer. They describes things vividly and clearly, from the legal principle of proximate cause to their memories of being abused. Their telling of the two stories runs back and forth in time, both within each story and between the two stories, which I think contributes to the somewhat dreamlike feeling---not that anything is vague or that the logical connections aren't clear, but that all points on both timelines are equally lucid and equally empathetic to everyone involved. (Not sympathetic, but one of the things Marzano-Lesnevich is trying to work through is how Ricky Langley became the person he became, and that requires empathy.) They trace all the different stories that Ricky Langley has told about himself, letting the contradictions in those stories speak for themselves (sometimes Langley says he molested Jeremy, sometimes he says he didn't, and it does seem to depend a good deal on who he's talking to).
Marzano-Lesnevich does not come to any real answers, which in fact may be one of the points the book is trying to make, the difference between the truth and the stories we tell about it, and the dangerous way in which the story can replace the diffcult, fragile, patchily unknowable truth....more
This is a monograph on what its subtitle says, "Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," in which Toni Morrison argues that white American writers havThis is a monograph on what its subtitle says, "Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," in which Toni Morrison argues that white American writers have depended on the presence of people of African descent to make their imaginative projects go on both the literal and the figurative level---this despite the pretense by white American critics and scholars that American literature is "race-free." This is a ludicrous, universalizing claim (white American experience=all human experience) that only in Toni Morrison's own lifetime began to be disrupted. Morrison looks at texts like Huckleberry Finn and To Have and Have Not and also texts like Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Willa Cather) that I had never even heard of. She teases out what she calls the Africanist presence in the texts she examines, noting the ways in which blackness is used both to define and enable the protagonists and the figurative, symbolic, or allegorical system in which they exist.
Morrison is a very sharp literary critic and explains better than anyone the terrible collapse of the end of Huckleberry Finn:
[...] the fatal ending becomes the elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanist character's escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave. [...] It is not what Jim seems that warrants inquiry, but what Mark Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him that should solicit our attention. In that sense the book may indeed be "great" because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom. (56-57)
I find her argument persuasive and beautifully written. And as she says, "My project rises from delight, not disappointment. It rises from what I know about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language, and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debates blanketed in their text. And rises from my certainty that writers always know, at some level, that they do this" (4). Toni Morrison, in other words, is giving her readers the key to the secret history of American literature by giving them a way to talk about the presence of Black people in a literary tradition that has denied them voice, agency, and humanity. I think, in her belief that "writers always know, at some level, that they do this," she may be kinder to Hemingway and some other authors than is necessarily warranted, but that belief also infuses her text with a great hopefulness.
(She also, in the preface, articulates something that I have been trying to teach my MFA students: "Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer's imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer's notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability" (xi).)...more
A collection of essays offering an overview of American Gothic, which nobody ever actually bothers to define, but which seems to be pretty co-extensivA collection of essays offering an overview of American Gothic, which nobody ever actually bothers to define, but which seems to be pretty co-extensive with "horror." The essays ranged from quite good to the one on Gothic film and TV, which I found myself yelling at a lot....more
This is a collection of essays offering an overview of "modern Gothic," which seems mostly to be code for "horror I want to have taken seriously." It This is a collection of essays offering an overview of "modern Gothic," which seems mostly to be code for "horror I want to have taken seriously." It seems to be a VERY LARGE umbrella and lots of things can keep out of the rain under it. Lots of vampires. The essays vary in quality from "interesting and useful" to "why are you telling me this?" It did remind me that I like reading literary criticism about horror, and I went through the bibliography with a finetoothed comb.
I would have liked more discussion of how the modern Gothic is linked---or not linked---to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic....more
This is a (not very good, unfortunately) book about a spate of gay-bashing murders in Sydney. Bondi (pronounced with a long i, Bondeye rather than BonThis is a (not very good, unfortunately) book about a spate of gay-bashing murders in Sydney. Bondi (pronounced with a long i, Bondeye rather than Bondee) is a famous Sydney beach that also has a section of cliffs, off of which, in the late 1980s, a group of thugs was throwing gay men. The crimes weren't properly investigated (being ruled "death by misadventure" by the coroner) until ten years later, when a cold case detective did the work that should have been done at the time.
Callaghan is not a bad writer, but he does not have the crucial gift of making cold case work compelling to read about. Possibly this is because of the other major flaw in the book, which is that he starts with sections from the victims' point of view. I object to these on principle, but in this specific case they---and the section from the murderers' point of view---telegraph what Detective Page is going to find, so there's no thrill of discovery for the reader as Page digs deeper. It all feels inevitable---and not a Greek tragedy sort of inevitable where you know what's going to happen and you keep turning the pages in horror (some true crime writers, e.g., Ann Rule, can generate this at will), but the sort of inevitable that saps the energy out of the book....more
I don't feel qualified to write a review of James Baldwin.
He was an amazing essayist (and a terrifying book reviewer), and it's really painful how relI don't feel qualified to write a review of James Baldwin.
He was an amazing essayist (and a terrifying book reviewer), and it's really painful how relevant his essays still are, how much progress we HAVEN'T made on racism in the last forty years.
I love his voice and his command of the English language. Reading him really reminded me that good prose is a thing that people can do....more