When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the
accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundation for
a literary tradition which has assumed a lasting role in American
culture. The House of Usher and its literary progeny have not
lacked for tenants in the century and a half since: writers from
Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted
houses of American fiction.
Yet while the haunted house motif looms archetypal
in the October country of the American mind, literary critics have
rarely inquired what it means and why it has endured. These are the
questions at the heart of Dale Bailey's American Nightmares: The
Haunted House Formula.
Bailey traces the haunted house tale from its
origins in English gothic fiction to the paperback potboilers of the
present, highlighting the unique significance of the house in the
domestic, economic, and social ideologies of our nation. In the hands of
our best gothic writers, Bailey concludes, the haunted house has become
a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone
nightmarishly awry in the American Dream.
American
Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction