Reflecting broader trends in literary studies, Rebecca Janicker's study focusses on three authors (H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King) who might be dismissed as purveyors of sensationalist fiction, and attempts to reclaim their worth, largely through a combination of close reading and contextualization. This historicizing is crucial to Janicker's thesis, as she justifies academic attention to these texts through the ways in which they “provide narrative spaces in which authors interrogate history” (30). There is, perhaps, little need to justify such an approach, as Janicker is not short of critical sources to draw on, and this thoroughly researched book serves as an excellent introduction to a vibrant field. This is based on the author's PhD thesis, and very much wears this credential on its sleeve. This is not so much a criticism as an indication of what kind of book this is. What is presented is a detailed introduction that surveys the field and justifies the critical approach, with a remarkable range of themes, motifs and theories covered. We encounter the critical concept of “American Gothic” alongside the history of European Gothic fiction, and explore the concept of the haunted house through the lens of spatial and anthropological theory, particularly liminality.

The theme is presented as haunting, although it eludes the recent focus on Derridean concepts of “hauntology” and spectrality as seen in Julian Wolfreys's Victorian Hauntings (2001) or Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham's collection Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2009). It is appropriate, however, that it avoids the nineteenth century and its postmillennial resurgence, as this is very much a study that focusses tightly on the sociohistorical conditions of the United States in the twentieth century, reading its texts as emblematic of specific political tensions and cultural anxieties. The three authors under consideration can justifiably be presented as writing within a tradition, although it is worth remembering that it is a tradition that includes many more authors (Shirley Jackson leaps to mind) who might well have been included here. This allows Janicker to focus on specific case studies in some detail, but precludes the possibility of drawing together an original unifying theory of the genre. This, however, is a project (as Janicker points out) that has been attempted before, notably in Dale Bailey's American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (1999).

Where Janicker departs from this path is in the use of liminality to engage with political ideology. All of these texts are considered on the basis of the extent to which they either uphold or critique particular aspects of ideology. Thus Walter Gilman, in Lovecraft's “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933), is seemingly transported to other dimensions, reflecting the author's engagement with new developments in physics and mathematics, but also making the place in which this happens into a liminal threshold between the past and present in which a Salem witch could reappear in the present by means of utilizing this interdimensional slippage. Analysing the author's frequent reference to the ethnicity of his characters, contrasting their difference with native New Englanders such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Janicker expands the scope of this fantastical story to encompass debates surrounding immigration and race in early twentieth-century America.

Where Lovecraft's response to social change is highly reactionary, Janicker reveals a more ambivalent stance from Richard Matheson, through an analysis of his novels A Stir of Echoes (1958) and Earthbound (1982). While Matheson is shown to idealize suburban norms, he does engage in a level of critique through characters like the former novel's protagonist Tom, who shows a sense of “anxiety about the conformist tendencies of the time in which he lives” (78). Earthbound, an erotic thriller about a sexually voracious ghost, is an interesting choice of novel, to say the least. Originally published by Playboy Press, and under the pseudonym “Logan Swanson,” this is something of a black sheep even amidst Matheson's cult output. Undeterred, Janicker relates the novel's themes convincingly to changing sexual mores and gender roles at the time of its publication. The focus here is less on the haunting of a physical house, than on haunting as a way of interrogating the institution of marriage and its attendant domestic politics.

This tendency towards the less-expected text continues in the final three chapters, devoted to Stephen King. While The Shining (1977) has seen its share of critical analysis, Christine (1983) and Bag of Bones (1998) appear less frequently in discussions of King and horror fiction more generally. This is perhaps understandable, as although Bag of Bones harks back thematically to the classic Gothic haunted-house story, even specifically referencing Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), Christine describes the haunting of a car, albeit one that is recognized in the novel as a kind of “hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber” (125). These chapters perform their remit convincingly, placing King's novels into their sociohistorical contexts, and particularly the complex engagement with the past seen in American Gothic productions. The conclusion surveys the field and explores some contemporary manifestations of the genre. As Janicker shows, this is a burgeoning area with some exciting scholarship emerging around these authors and specifically the representation of space and place, of which this book is a very worthy contribution. The classic tension between the demands of thesis and book form does mean that this falls short of providing the comprehensive overview of literary haunted houses that it might be seen as promising. As a meaningful study of the texts under consideration, however, it covers solid ground and brings in fresh perspectives that will be of interest to anyone interested in exploring these particular foreboding places.

The first thing that leaps out from Paul Hurh's provocatively titled American Terror is a striking sense of ambition. It attempts to grapple with nothing short of the emotional affect of terror and, using its three writers as case studies, the relationship between literary fiction and epistemology. Terror, he argues, appears in American literature “as constitutive of a deep affective commitment to the project of completing thinking through aesthetic feeling” (9). In doing so, Hurh makes a case for American literature's vibrant contribution to post-Enlightenment philosophy, even going so far as to locate the seeds of post-structural thought in the terrors of, for example, Poe's representation of the trapped and fractured self. There is both excitement and terror here in the dawning realization that he is right.

Hurh's study attempts to overturn some assumptions about the “power of blackness” (1) that Herman Melville identifies in Nathaniel Hawthorne, and which has come to persist in discussions of American literature. The most striking twentieth-century proponent of this view was Leslie Fiedler, whose Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) has gone from shocking to canonical in the half-century since its publication. Fiedler saw American literature as essentially Gothic, and identified a tension between “a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (3). Fiedler's thesis has informed many later critics, who have also taken on board Toni Morrison's claim that American literature is haunted by the shadow of slavery.Footnote ¹ In this line of thinking, literary terrors can be read as an expression of anxiety caused by a kind of national repression of trauma. This, Hurh argues, is an expression of a larger perception of the Gothic as a critique of the limits of Enlightenment thought. In contrast, he proposes a model whereby fear is utilized in the text as the very opposite: as a complimentary means of thinking through thought processes that may be otherwise inaccessible.

The project is not easily summed up, as Hurh self-effacingly admits. At times the writing feels like the critic's battle with his own thought processes as he attempts to articulate what is categorically inexpressible in the texts under examination. “In the darkness of American literature,” he writes, thinking about why authors are drawn to terror, “the answer is neither an enduring presence nor a distressing absence but rather a tone that reflects the thought that asks” (30). Yet a certain amount of circling the issue is permissible. The nature of the project comes through clearly in a series of sustained and perceptive readings that, as Hurh writes, examines how these authors “sought to reframe thought through terror as an artistic device” (30).

Although Hurh questions some assumptions in the discourse surrounding recent studies in American Gothic writing, he follows the line of thought that sees a continuity between the fire-and-brimstone preaching of Calvinist preachers in the early United States (here represented by Jonathan Edwards), and the tone of later Gothic writing produced for more secular purposes, hence the choice of authors under examination. All three, he contests, sought to “analyze the methods of mind through forms of feeling” (29). Hurh's writing engages closely with philosophy, particularly epistemology, and draws on historical and biographical detail, but remains first and foremost a literary analysis. The level of detail is impressive, and the readings are often startling in their reappraisal of familiar (and less familiar) works. The analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), for example, focusses on Usher's reading of the “Mad Trist” tale, and how the interplay of this internal narrative with the one we think we are reading produces a series of “self-enclosing frames” that make this into a peculiarly “auto-critical work” (116). A sustained analysis of the notion of “perversity” in Poe places the concept at the centre of his work and argues that it does not, in fact, overturn Enlightenment rationality but rather allows him to “draw from and reflect upon the structure of analytical process and rational thought” (158).

Melville's fiction, specifically Moby-Dick (1851) and The Piazza Tales (1856), emerges less as allegory and more as a sustained exploration of the possibility of knowledge. The great white whale becomes a means of thinking through Locke's empiricism versus Kant's transcendental idealism, dramatized in the struggle with ropes aboard the Pequod. If this sounds excessive, then Hurh is prepared to demonstrate otherwise, through close reading of the text and painstaking reference to Melville's journals as well as his philosophical sources. This sense of detail and control pervades American Terror, and is evidenced by the copious notes Hurh attaches to the end of the book. Many readers of this strand of American fiction will no doubt have been unaware of the possibilities inherent in connecting the texts to contemporaneous philosophical theory, but the ways in which stories like “The Lightning-Rod Man” (1856) and “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) can be explained and yet further problematized by contextualizing alongside Kierkegaard is a revelation.

Hurh ends by discussing the limits of what he has set out to do. The tensions between aesthetic and ideological interpretation of texts, he claims, have failed to fully explain the power of terror, specifically in American literature. Rather, his attempt is to provide a reading that is “at once historically situated in the intellectual discourse of the period and at the same time drawn from and attentive to the aesthetic claims of the literary work” (246). This succeeds, in that the book remains faithful to a tradition of close literary analysis in its sensitivity not just to how, but also to why, the story matters, while making genuinely exciting connections in terms of literary theory. This deserves to be thought of as a major contribution to the study of Edwards, Poe, and Melville, but also as a provocative and important intervention in the relationship between American literature and the Gothic that continues to dominate the conversation.