Description: "The specters that Redding stalks in this book bear no resemblance to the horrors conjured up by Horace Walpole or M. R. James. Redding's ghosts evoke the memory of the US's cultural past, suggesting that even though one may wish to lay some unsettling elements of the American heritage to rest, they will not stay buried. Redding ably demonstrates that in modern gothic works 'guilt cannot be fully assigned,' 'making enacting justice especially troublesome because the destruction of innocence is a central fact of this genre. His argument is stimulating and powerful enough to entice even reluctant students to appreciate relationships between the fiction they are assigned to read and contemporary as well as past reality. The author draws his examples from a diverse collection of writers, a group as thought provoking as his argument. Redding's style will induce the reader to think the author is addressing him or her directly, a good way to encourage enthusiasm both for the literature and for the insights it provides. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -- CHOICE " Haints is an interesting and provocative study of manifestations of the Gothic in contemporary American culture. The writing is lively and [author's name] deftly integrates Derridean deconstruction ( Specters of Marx , largely as filtered through Avery Gordon and Eric Savoy) with contemporary cultural studies."--Jeffrey Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University. He is the author of Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women and Charles Brockden Brown: A Polemical Introduction .

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