A review by ehmannky
Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole

challenging informative slow-paced

5.0

This is such an interesting and compelling about our connection to the monstrous and the monstrous' role in expressing national anxieties in our popular media. Poole never assumes a 1-1 metaphor, but he does show how common themes (the reemergence of the vampire at different points in American history, for example) are useful shorthand for working through these anxieties. He also doesn't shy away from the role of the monstrous in helping maintain oppressive regimes and the status quo. I appreciated that in this second edition he shows how our language of the monstrous has played a role in instances like the police shootings of unarmed black people and how visions of dread play into Donald Trump's rhetoric. But he also shows that the monstrous can be sympathetic, that it can also be used by the oppressed to speak back to the mainstream.