Table Of ContentAMERICAN HORROR
FICTION AND CLASS
From Poe to Twilight
David Simmons
Palgrave Gothic
Series editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
This series of gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many inter-
related, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for
the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and
horror and how that taste became, not only international (with a huge
fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility
of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse areas as the
nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the
self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a mini-
mum and theory contextualised where possible. All the books are reada-
ble by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested
in the subject.
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Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK
Prof. Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA
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Dr. Alison Peirse, University of Yorkshire, UK
Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
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David Simmons
American Horror
Fiction and Class
From Poe to Twilight
David Simmons
University of Northampton
Birmingham, UK
Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-1-137-53279-4 ISBN 978-1-137-53280-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53280-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944603
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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I dedicate this book to my father, David Robert Simmons, for introducing
me to the novels and films that instilled me with a lifelong love
of the macabre, the grotesque, and the terrifying.
A
cknowledgements
A book such as this is a labour of love produced by virtue of the com-
bined efforts of a multitude of people. To that end, I would like to use
this space to thank a number of those who helped me, directly or indi-
rectly, to steer this monograph towards publication. Firstly, I thank my
two bosses, Kate Williams and Richard Canning, for their management
of my workload allowance, without this generous assistance it is unlikely
that this book would have materialised at all. Staying within the acad-
emy, I’d like to thank my colleagues and friends, Lorna Jowett, Michael
Starr, Laurence Marriott, Richard Chamberlain and Claire Allen at the
University of Northampton; and slightly further afield, Gerry Carlin and
Gina Wisker, all of whom offered reassurance and advice that fed into the
finished manuscript. Thanks must also go to everyone at my publishers,
Palgrave, for their sage and useful editorial guidance. I thank my family
for their ongoing love. Finally, I would like to single out Nicola Allen’s
tireless support and encouragement; we went through some real horrors
during the writing of this book, but I hope that it is not the only pro-
ductive outcome of that period.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Establishing the Place of Class
in US Gothic and Horror Fiction 1
2 Class and Horror Fiction During the Early Twentieth
Century 39
3 Class and Horror Fiction at Mid-Century 79
4 Representing Class During the Horror Boom
of the 1970s and 1980s 119
5 Horror Fiction and Class in the Contemporary Period 159
Index 197
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Establishing the Place of Class
in US Gothic and Horror Fiction
The last century has witnessed a sea change in the way that Americans
think about class and particularly about the poor. There has been a
notable shift away from a widespread belief in the validity of progres-
sive ideals, to what many historians and critics have described as a post-
progressive ideology that embodies “a resurgent conservatism over the
responsibilities of the fortunate towards the poor” (Newman 1991:
115). There are a number of reasons for this shift. Progressive era atti-
tudes, which widely circulated in the late nineteenth century and held
sway until well into the 1960s, underwent a great deal of criticism dur-
ing the 1980s as part of the rise and subsequent dominance of successive
conservative (and then neoconservative) governments, beginning with
Richard Nixon and reaching their pinnacle with the tenure of George W.
Bush. Tied to changes in government, the widely perceived failure of the
‘war on poverty’ (originated by Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1960s)
has meant that, during the last thirty years, Americans have increasingly
been encouraged to question the efficacy of welfare as a tool for social
reform. Instead, and up until fairly recently with the election of Barack
Obama and a move back towards social welfare reform, much popular
rhetoric had sought to reassert the need for a free market and advocated
an anti-interventionist approach by government that is more ‘hands off’
when it comes to the day-to-day lives of its voters, supposedly allowing
for greater self-sufficiency and thus self-determination on behalf of the
individual. The popularity of such laissez-faire ideas in the contemporary
era has meant that formerly progressive attitudes, which would tend to
© The Author(s) 2017 1
D. Simmons, American Horror Fiction and Class, Palgrave Gothic,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53280-0_1
2 D. SIMMONS
theorise and position the poor as being ‘like us’ but as having lost their
way as a result of environment or misfortune and thus deserving of our
help, have been steadily eroded away to the point where Americans are
often now encouraged to think the reverse: that the poor are fundamen-
tally different to them; that they live in a different way with different val-
ues and models of behaviour; and that this is their choice. Indeed, the
growth in currency of the ‘underclass’ concept, seeing the poor as a dis-
tinct social group (coined by Ken Aluetta in 1982) would seem to testify
to this change in thinking. In his book Class Representation in Modern
Fiction and Film (2007) Keith Gandal explores this ideological shift away
from progressivism, suggesting that what Americans have achieved in
the last fifty years is a way of symbolically distancing the poor by fore-
grounding the notion of a difference between the materially wealthy and
the poor in the form of ‘a culture of poverty’ (5). This reconfiguration
of poverty into the domain of culture means that those who are poor
can be blamed for their lifestyles and behaviour as they cease to become
‘innocent’ victims of larger societal systems in the eyes of the larger com-
munity. Liberal scholar William Julius Wilson argues that the concept
of ‘a culture of poverty’ diverts attention away from important issues of
social justice, transforming the idea of the poor as a changeable effect of
inequalities in social and societal structures into an unalterable process
of generational reproduction in which those who are poor are inevitably
bound to pass on a mode of behaviour to their children, and their chil-
dren’s children, and are thus not worth helping.
The widespread ideology of culpability in relation to the poor within
US society over the last thirty years has inevitably created an atten-
dant, fundamental change in the way popular culture depicts the poor
in its fictions. Indeed, it seems inevitable that given the wider ideologi-
cal changes taking place in the US during the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries, the depiction of the poor as essentially comparable to the
reader (or viewer) was also replaced with a representation of the poor
that often stresses the difference and alien-ness of those living in poverty;
as an ultimately, unknowable mass—more in keeping with Edward Said’s
concept of the Other. While it is notable that, as Fiona Devine suggests
in her sociological study Social Class in America and Britain (1997), the
issue of class has been almost totally ignored in the field of mainstream
politics during the latter half of the twentieth century: “Class issues…
have not been mobilised in any radical way by the Democratic Party,
which is largely committed to moderate liberalism” (76). This shunning
