In this lively and accessible study, Bernice Murphy considers why the dark counterpart to the Suburban Dream has surfaced so repeatedly in popular culture in postwar, late twentieth-century, America. Forming part of the wider American gothic tradition, Murphy argues that the suburban gothic offers a unique way to consider the anxieties engendered by suburban expansion, and this study will be of use to both researchers and students, thanks to the deft way she handles the interaction between intellectual history, suburban studies and popular culture.

Taking a broadly chronological approach, Murphy selects representative texts to illustrate particular strands within the suburban gothic. In the first chapter, the works of postwar writers Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson are analysed in the light of contemporary criticisms of suburban development. The horrors of conformity and the risk of mental illness which John Keats and others saw lurking in suburbia were effectively explored by Jackson and Matheson, with Matheson's I Am Legend, for example, dramatizing these questions via the frustrated male suburbanite trying to hold out against the nightly attacks of marauding vampires. Similar anxieties about the depersonalizing quality of the suburban lifestyle are considered in the third chapter, which discusses texts from across the period, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. Murphy develops the feminist criticism of suburbia found in the later text by expanding her reading of the suburban gothic to encompass the use of gothic tropes in other genres such as sitcoms. This produces an engaging reading of the figure of the wife-as-witch, seen, for example, in the popular TV series Bewitched, with Murphy arguing that Samantha's struggle with the demands of her suburban life and ordinary husband dramatized, week after week, the struggles many women faced in creating and sustaining fulfilling lives within new residential patterns and spaces.

Murphy further contends that the anxieties engendered by suburbanization went beyond the effect on the lived experience of the individual to encompass America's history of expansion and appropriation, as demonstrated in her reading of the much-used (and oft-parodied) ‘haunted Indian burial ground’ plot. Murphy notes, however, that suburban gothic texts based on hauntings have declined in popularity since their heyday in the 1970s. Instead, the kinds of familial and psychological conflicts which were dramatized through projection onto ghosts or possessed houses have been transferred onto the inhabitants themselves, with the suburbs harbouring local serial killers such as Halloween's Michael Myers.

Some of Murphy's most pertinent insights come from her discussion of the economic and racial dimensions of suburban gothic texts, such as her analysis of Wes Craven's The People under the Stairs or the recent cable series Weeds. Perhaps as testament to their potency, these issues only manifest in genre texts occasionally and Murphy's alertness to them is one of the study's major strengths.

As the seemingly incongruous pairing of the popularity of Desperate Housewives and the economic fallout from the subprime mortgage fiasco remind us, the suburban ideal continues to exert a powerful pull on the American imagination, and Murphy's work offers a timely analysis of its history and meaning.