"Zombies, vampires and ghosts feature prominently in nearly all forms of entertainment in the 21st century, including popular fiction, film, comics, television and computer games. But these creatures have been vital to the entertainment industry since the best-seller books of a century and half ago. Monsters don't just invade popular culture, they help sell popular culture"--
Contributed by English and literature scholars from North America and the UK, the 12 essays in this collection examine monsters in American, European, Japanese, and Serbian contexts from the 1890s to the 2010s, focusing on those that are absent from criticism, such as the deity Pan, the Gothic Bear, mushroom people, and Lovecraftian monsters, and new readings of monsters in familiar works like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, Angela Carter's The Lady of the House of Love, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. They also discuss Richard Laymon's The Traveling Vampire Show, Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, A Serbian Film, Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching, Richard Marsh's The Beetle, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Parasite, Marie Corelli's Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul, and the Japanese horror film Matango. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
