Synopses & Reviews
Historian W. Scott Poole traces the confluence of history, technology, and art that gave us modern horror films and literature.
The roots of modern horror are found in the First World War. It was the most devastating event to occur in the early 1900s, with 38 million dead and 17 million wounded in the most grotesque of ways, owing to the new machines brought to war. If Downton Abbey showed the ripple effect of this catastrophe above stairs, Wasteland reveals how bloody battlefields, screaming asylums, and desolated cities and villages made their ways into the darker corners of our psyche.
Historian W. Scott Poole chronicles the era’s major figures — Freud, T.S. Eliot, H.P. Lovecraft, Wilfred Owen, Peter Lorre, David Cronenberg, and Freddy Krueger — as well as their influences. Wasteland is a surprising — but wholly convincing — perspective on horror that also speaks to the audience for history, film, and popular culture.
November 11th, 2018 is the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that brought World War I to a close, and a number of smart and well-received recent histories have helped us reevaluate this conflict. Now W. Scott Poole takes us behind the frontlines of battle to the dark places of the imagination where the legacy of the War to End All Wars lives on.
Review
“W. Scott Poole combines smart readings of the horror classics with detailed knowledge of twentieth-century history, art, and literature to dig deep into the serious side of these popular entertainments. I thought I already knew the subject inside out, but Wasteland introduced me to fresh facts, new ideas, and surprising connections. This is cultural history of a very high order: intelligent, lively, and wonderfully readable.” Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters
Review
“Elegantly written and cogently argued, Wasteland convincingly demonstrates the modern horror genre’s origins in the great Dance of Death that was the First World War.” David J. Skal, author of The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
Review
“Poole brings a scholar’s eye and a devotee’s heart to a study of the literary, film, and artistic incarnations of horror from the World War I period to today.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
Thoroughly engrossing cultural study...Poole persuasively argues that the birth of horror as a genre is rooted in the unprecedented destruction and carnage of WWI...Will make it hard for readers who haven’t considered the wartime context for horror’s emergence to forget it.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the Author
W. SCOTT POOLE is a professor of history at the College of Charleston, and he teaches and writes about horror and popular culture. His past books include the award-winning Monsters in America and the biography Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror. He is a Bram Stoker award nominee for his critically acclaimed biography of H.P. Lovecraft, In the Mountains of Madness.