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Duke University Press, 1995). Both works look primarily at structures of power and sexuality in a colonial/postcolonial context. However, their expositions of raced notions of gender and their interpretations of the construction of sexualities within the politics of the body and culture have been very determinative for my own analysis of the American society’s constructions of deviance and normalcy.
    Two works on the relationship between gender and the horror genre are acknowledged throughout the book, but both deserve some mention here. Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995) and Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Halberstam’s Skin Shows illuminates the nature of gender in relation to gothic fictions and includes a compelling reading of both the novel Frankenstein and the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs . Her definition of the monster as a meaning machine, productive of a variety of gendered cultural dynamics, can be seen on almost every page of my study. Her more recent work is some of the most articulate and revolutionary expositions of transgender theory, including In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
    Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws provided a breakthrough in feminist readings of the horror genre, especially with regard to the gendered politics of the slasher film. Her interpretation of the importance of the final girl is key to my own reading of this genre’s significance in late twentieth-century American history. Also worth examining is an excellent essay collection edited by Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord entitled Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006). Especially useful in this collection is the essay by Steven Jay Schneider entitled “The Madwomen in Our Movies: Female Psycho-Killers in American Horror Cinema.”
    The work of scholars of religious studies and especially religion in American history is key to a number of aspects of this book. Douglas E. Cowan’s Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008) provides all of us working in this field with a learned discussion of how cultural fears are represented in our collective dream-life of film and literature. I am a great admirer of George Marsden. His work, especially Religion and American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990) and Fundamentalism in American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) informed all of my writing about American religious history. Gary Ladderman’s studies of the American “way of death” are essential to my interpretation in chapter 2 of the late Victorian period, especially The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death: 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
    Finally, many of my source materials for my discussions of the twentieth century are drawn from my own collection of comics, fan magazines, memorabilia, and films. I hope that it is clear how much I am immersed in the material I write about; all my criticisms of the various tropes and metaphors of pop culture are best seen in this light. Twilight may well be the only work discussed that I consider so ideologically and aesthetically repugnant that I see no value in it. If I have a quarrel with King Kong or The Bride of Frankenstein it is most assuredly a lover’s quarrel.

NOTES
     
Preface
    1   Halberstam writes, “The Monster’s body is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative.” I am here elaborating on Halberstam’s meaning and suggesting that American monsters, in the gothic