Description: When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundations for a literacy tradition which Edgar has assumed a lasting role in American culture. The House of Usher and its Iiterary progeny have not lacked for tenants in the century and a half since; writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken some rooms in the haunted houses of American Fiction.

Yet, while the haunted house motif looms archetypal in the October country of the American mind, Iiterary critics have rarely inquired what it means or why it has endured. These are the questions at the head of Dale Bailey's American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction.

Bailey believes that the popularity of the haunted house formula depends upon its versatility in exploring American themes. In this study he discribes the formula and explains its continued success through an investigation of a representative sample of American haunted house literature which is distinguished from the ghost story as practiced by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others.

Bailey traces the haunted house tale from its origins in English gothic fiction to the paperback potboilers of the present, highlighting the unique significance of the house in the domestic, economic, and social ideologies of our nation. In the hands of the best gothic writers, Bailey subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American dream.

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