This new study has a very simple thesis: from the very beginnings of settlement the American imagination has been shaped by monsters. In his chronological survey W. Scott Poole jumps backwards and forwards between historical perceptions of different periods and contemporary fiction and film, showing how the latter are not gratuitous inventions but to an extent engage in historical revision. What we have here is thus a countertradition shadowing the grand national narrative of rational democratic experiment. Of course, this is not a new insight, but that is not the point. Monsters in America is a synthetic study, explicitly drawing on the research of figures like David J. Skal, and its main value is the overview it offers of this scholarship and the multiple connections it suggests between different cultural and historical phenomena. One of the dominant factors in the persistence of this tradition has been Christianity, which demonized unknown creatures and races. Indeed, the strongest and darkest thread running through this survey explicitly and implicitly has been race. Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World is a seminal work in describing the embattled world of the godly besieged by devils of unnervingly varied forms and, as James Baldwin was later to note with dismay, the polarized black–white symbolism of Christianity had unavoidably negative racial implications for African Americans. Obviously they had no monopoly in this. Pierton W. Dooner's Last Days of the Republic (1880) warned of an Asiatic invasion of America by stealth, figuring the process as the gradual spread of a malignant disease. But, as Poole shows, by the mid-nineteenth century a growing fashion for freak shows, an emerging race theory and a surge in nativist politics were combining to demonize African Americans as monsters amid white America. Monsters in America argues that no period was without its projections of the monstrous and also that writers like H. P. Lovecraft were reinforcing a complex set of identifications through their racial subtexts.

When we are told that “the horrors of the monster films of the 1930s mirrored the realities of American history” (104), a weakness in this study begins to emerge. “Mirrors” suggests a naively simple model of how cultural products relate to history. It is valuable in itself to insist that they are connected, but that only tells half the story. For instance, few would dispute the racial implications of King Kong, but the self-perpetuating iconicity of this and later monster movies is not really considered by Poole. By the same token, how helpful is it to link with the monster tradition the covert experiments conducted on African Americans from the 1930s to the 1950s? It becomes loose and uninformative to describe the medical presumptions underpinning these experiments as monstrous. When Poole turns to the Cold War period he rightly lists multiple anxieties feeding into a resurgence of horror movies. The 1951 movie The Thing from Another World strikingly politicizes the original story by suggesting superpower conflict over the Arctic and by popularizing the catchphrase of the period, “keep watching the skies.” A central issue in the monster tradition centres on visualization, which is hardly discussed here. The popularity in film titles of this period of terms like “it,” “them,” or “the thing” teased audiences with the possibilities of monsters just out of sight. And, as Poole and others have rightly noted, the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers disturbingly revised the monstrous into a transformation of the familiar. One of the most interesting sections of his study focusses on the 1970s and 1980s, when, he argues, violent horror went mainstream. The popular fascination with serial killers may have been a bizarre offshoot of celebrity culture, a link which has become comically explicit in American Psycho. A central figure in this development of horror movies has been the director and special-effects artist Tom Savini. Poole has further insights to offer in linking works like Salem's Lot with the then unfolding drama of the Watergate revelations and the popularity of zombie films with the AIDS epidemic. However hackneyed they might become, monsters have persisted in popular culture since the 1980s as a means of dramatizing anxieties over new technologies of the body and even playing a role in the debate over the “posthuman.” This may be one of Poole's most useful insights: that the monstrous is no longer marginal but rather an integral part of the imagistic vocabulary of American culture, continuously being revised for new purposes.