What do you think?
Rate this book
American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction
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 that 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 writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted houses of American fiction. Dale 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. The author concludes that the haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream.
156 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 1999
14 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Dale Bailey
125 books170 followersDale was born in West Virginia in 1968, and grew up in a town called Princeton, just north of the Virginia line. His stories have appeared in lots of places—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Sci-Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, and various anthologies. Several of them have been nominated for awards, and “Death and Suffrage,” later filmed as part of Showtime’s television anthology series Masters of Horror, won the International Horror Guild Award.
In 2003, Golden Gryphon Press collected his stories as The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. Two novels, The Fallen and House of Bones, came out from Signet books around the same time. A third novel—Sleeping Policemen, written with with his friend Jack Slay, Jr.—came out in 2006. He has also written a study of haunted-house fiction called American Nightmares.
He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter.
In 2003, Golden Gryphon Press collected his stories as The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. Two novels, The Fallen and House of Bones, came out from Signet books around the same time. A third novel—Sleeping Policemen, written with with his friend Jack Slay, Jr.—came out in 2006. He has also written a study of haunted-house fiction called American Nightmares.
He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 22, 2018
Short study that does what it says on the tin: looks at how the haunted house is presented in American popular culture. The author's main argument is that the contemporary American haunted house has been used as a means of criticising social priorities, for instance materialism and economic exploitation, by exploring how an unhealthy focus on these makes an individual vulnerable to the supernatural. This isn't a particularly original view, perhaps, but it is a valid one and Bailey supports it well.
He also successfully straddles the line between academic and popular criticism here, making this an immensely readable book. It helps, I think, that the study is limited and not exhaustive - Bailey focuses on a handful of popular examples, including The Amityville Horror, The Shining, and The Haunting of Hill House - and I often find that limited examples prove a point much better than exhaustive exploration, which can frequently muddy the focus by meandering off into byways. It's a really interesting and well-focused study, and I enjoyed reading it.
He also successfully straddles the line between academic and popular criticism here, making this an immensely readable book. It helps, I think, that the study is limited and not exhaustive - Bailey focuses on a handful of popular examples, including The Amityville Horror, The Shining, and The Haunting of Hill House - and I often find that limited examples prove a point much better than exhaustive exploration, which can frequently muddy the focus by meandering off into byways. It's a really interesting and well-focused study, and I enjoyed reading it.
February 29, 2012
An in depth overview of the sub Genre.
Bailey is a great writer, I like to think of him as the Alton Brown of Fiction. If you do not know who I am talking about watch a little show called Good Eats you will see what I mean.He is capable of putting in amusing references to Eddie Murphy's classic Delirious. And still loses you with his deep knowledge of literature.
I have yet to read Shirley Jacksons Haunting of Hill House but that seem by all accounts. To be the holy grail of Haunted house fiction, So I need to move it up on my list.
I am very eager to start reading some of his work, which I have in my to read list. Of coarse he has his own haunted house book which I believe I will start reading soon. After I read Hill house.
Bailey is a great writer, I like to think of him as the Alton Brown of Fiction. If you do not know who I am talking about watch a little show called Good Eats you will see what I mean.He is capable of putting in amusing references to Eddie Murphy's classic Delirious. And still loses you with his deep knowledge of literature.
I have yet to read Shirley Jacksons Haunting of Hill House but that seem by all accounts. To be the holy grail of Haunted house fiction, So I need to move it up on my list.
I am very eager to start reading some of his work, which I have in my to read list. Of coarse he has his own haunted house book which I believe I will start reading soon. After I read Hill house.
August 20, 2018
As literary criticism goes, Bailey is very accessible. I read this book just about as quickly as I’d read a novel. The language is not at all pretentious, (let’s face it: some academics use what is supposed to be a shorthand, universal set of terms that should provide clarity in a discourse community as a way to flaunt their overabundance of brain cells) and Bailey interweaves nostalgia about his boyhood love of the horror genre into some very poignant observations about its cultural functions. If you’re new to lit crit, this book is a good place to start.
To read the rest of this review, visit The Macabre Librarian:
https://macabrelibrarian.wordpress.co...
To read the rest of this review, visit The Macabre Librarian:
https://macabrelibrarian.wordpress.co...
April 30, 2022
Very enjoyable book of essays about some of the great haunted house books--The Shining, The Haunting of Hill House, The House Next Door, Burnt Offerings, etc. The writing is straightforward, and whether or not I always agreed with exactly what the author was saying, I was always enjoying hearing their thoughts. I just wish it was written more recently so I could hear what they thought of modern haunted house stories too.
August 5, 2022
Interesting survey and discussion. I had read most of the books he mentioned, which added to my enjoyment.
November 22, 2023
A short but very rewarding survey of the Haunted House genre, from one of the genre’s own practitioners. Nothing is ever going to unhorse Stephen King’s Danse Macabre from its perch atop the genre of pop horror analysis, and American Nightmares does in fact plow some of the same ground. Still, even when revisiting the sites of King’s excavation, Dale Bailey unearths new details. His generous (but well-reasoned) definition of the haunted house even ropes in liminal cases like Jay Gatsby’s Long Island Mansion and Scarlett O’Hara’s beloved Tara. Clearly, once the genre began to deal with people other than literal aristocrats, status anxiety and financial anxiety were part of the package.
His thesis (if an informal survey can have one) is that the genre can be divided into roughly two periods. There are the books prior to the 20th century, more interested in hereditary curses, a poisoned state of mind, versus the modern ones, in which the house itself is evil. Older statelier tales like The Turn of the Screw are also more delicate in their handling of the supernatural, leaving it to the reader to decide what’s what. By the late twentieth-century, in the wake of cultural watershed (and crappy book) The Amityville Horror, subtleties were gone. Walls bled, ceiling fans tried to decapitate new homeowners, and the furnace bellowed out ominous warnings. And still, as Eddie Murphy mused in his breakthrough special, Delirious, the white people refused to leave the damn house. You can hardly blame them, as these people many times had their last dollar tied up in there.
The survey ends with a short section on the “Ghost in the Machine,” techno-horrors first envisioned by Ray Bradbury who imagined the “smart house” before it existed. This idea of haunted technology was arguably given its most memorable instantiation in the leering red eye of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; I guess the old master made more than one haunted house movie, then.
The heart of the book, for me, was Chapter Three: June Cleaver in the House of Horrors, which deals with the works and life of horror maestro Shirley Jackson. Famed mostly in her own day for the short story The Lottery, and articles she wrote for various women’s magazines, Jackson has finally gotten a well-earned reassessment. Still, there can never be enough, and little of what there is, is bound to be as penetrating and readable as what Bailey brings to the table.
I suppose that’s another thing that needs stressing about this book: Bailey, while having a much more academic and analytical style than Stephen King, is eminently readable. At times his prose is in fact compulsively readable, and always easy to savor. Recommended, for those fans of the genre, and even nonfans with an intellectual interest in the phenomenon of the haunted house.
His thesis (if an informal survey can have one) is that the genre can be divided into roughly two periods. There are the books prior to the 20th century, more interested in hereditary curses, a poisoned state of mind, versus the modern ones, in which the house itself is evil. Older statelier tales like The Turn of the Screw are also more delicate in their handling of the supernatural, leaving it to the reader to decide what’s what. By the late twentieth-century, in the wake of cultural watershed (and crappy book) The Amityville Horror, subtleties were gone. Walls bled, ceiling fans tried to decapitate new homeowners, and the furnace bellowed out ominous warnings. And still, as Eddie Murphy mused in his breakthrough special, Delirious, the white people refused to leave the damn house. You can hardly blame them, as these people many times had their last dollar tied up in there.
The survey ends with a short section on the “Ghost in the Machine,” techno-horrors first envisioned by Ray Bradbury who imagined the “smart house” before it existed. This idea of haunted technology was arguably given its most memorable instantiation in the leering red eye of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; I guess the old master made more than one haunted house movie, then.
The heart of the book, for me, was Chapter Three: June Cleaver in the House of Horrors, which deals with the works and life of horror maestro Shirley Jackson. Famed mostly in her own day for the short story The Lottery, and articles she wrote for various women’s magazines, Jackson has finally gotten a well-earned reassessment. Still, there can never be enough, and little of what there is, is bound to be as penetrating and readable as what Bailey brings to the table.
I suppose that’s another thing that needs stressing about this book: Bailey, while having a much more academic and analytical style than Stephen King, is eminently readable. At times his prose is in fact compulsively readable, and always easy to savor. Recommended, for those fans of the genre, and even nonfans with an intellectual interest in the phenomenon of the haunted house.
November 13, 2023
Good as an intro to horror theory, especially since it looks at horror fiction via popular books but still, most of it felt like a pretty surface-level analysis--I think even most read-and-put-down kind of readers will be able to tell that the shining is about capitalism and the American dream. Even then, extra stars for adding Marasco's Burnt Offerings, I rarely ever see it discussed !
April 20, 2021
useful reading but for a book on specifically the haunted house formula it takes a lot of reading to find the bits that are related to said formula :/
January 21, 2008
A good start to critiquing the American Haunted House formula. I could do without the random side comments from the author, but overall it does a fairly good job of... quoting Stephen King's Danse Macabre. I would love to read an updated version of this book that included more contemporary stories, as well as expanded to stories from outside the United States.
January 20, 2009
Scholarly take on haunted house novel formula.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews