A fusion of travel literature and cultural criticism investigating the dark history of the US and exploring how past horrors – from witch trials to slavery and genocide – continue to haunt the national consciousness.“Ghosts frequently speak of a lost past, but just as often they gesture forwards to an unrealised future, a dream that failed to come true.”The witches and ghouls of New England; vampires and zombies in the bible belt; atomic monsters o...

In the decades since the Second World War, the teenage witch has emerged as a major American cultural trope. Appearing in films, novels, comics and on television, adolescent witches have long reflected shifting societal attitudes towards the teenage demographic. At the same time, teen witches have also served as a means through which adolescent femininity can be conceptualised, interrogated and reimagined. Drawing on a wide theoretical framework – including the works of Deleuze and Foucaul...

Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic TitleToxic nostalgia is not a new phenomenon, and instances of an undying past refusing to perish and plaguing the present, can be found throughout history. However, examined in Toxic Nostalgia on Screen, in the early years of the new millennium, it has acquired further meaning and not just applies to a dangerous longing for the past, but a way of being in the present world. Here in our modern time, undead memory is not jus...

A fusion of travel literature and cultural criticism investigating the dark history of the US and exploring how past horrors – from witch trials to slavery and genocide – continue to haunt the national consciousness.“Ghosts frequently speak of a lost past, but just as often they gesture forwards to an unrealised future, a dream that failed to come true.”The witches and ghouls of New England; vampires and zombies in the bible belt; atomic monsters o...

This book constitutes a timely and necessary intervention in the academic study of Satanism. At the same time, the book also constitutes a vital addition to the field of Gothic and Horror Studies. Although recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in figures such as the witch, the zombie and the vampire, Satan and his acolytes have been largely ignored (aside from where they overlap with the witch). This volume seeks to address this lacuna in Gothic Studies by examining how Satanis...

Detailing the adventures of a supernatural clan of vampires, witches, and assorted monstrosities, Ray Bradbury’s Elliott family stories are a unique component of his extensive literary output. Written between 1946 and 1994, Bradbury eventually quilted the stories together into a novel, From the Dust Returned (2001), making it a creative project that spanned his adult life. Not only do the stories focus on a single familial unit, engaging with overlapping twentieth-century themes o...