Free Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole Page B

provided mental fodder for the culture wars of the contemporary period. 1
    You see why I did not want to give you a definition? Monsters have been manufacturing complex meanings for four hundred years of American history. They do not mean one thing but a thousand. Only by looking at a multitude of monsters can we come to understand something about them and, in turn, something about American history. This book proposes to examine American history through its monsters.
    So do not expect neat definitions when it comes to a messy subject like monsters. A monster is a beast of excess, and monster stories are tales of excess. Part of what makes the horror film so much fun is that it refuses to follow the narrative plot of a simple melodrama. It does not contain conflict and ignore contradictions in order to produce a happy ending. It blows conventions into a million pieces and makes a fetish out of excess. In this the horror film takes on the nature of its subject and its agent: the monster. 2
    The subject of monsters contains too much meaning. It is the House That Drips Blood and the thing with 20,000 eyes. It is bigger than it should be, more insatiable than anything in nature; it desires more and frightens you with its yawning monstrous maw. The very messiness of the monster makes it the perfect entry into understanding the messiness of American history. If history were music it would not have the austere balance of a Bach concerto. It would be the opening assault of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK,” angry, discordant, and yawping at you in combative tones. History issues threats as much as it inspires reflection.
    Some historians will be less than happy with this book. Many of them will note that I spend more time on sea serpents than the Civil War, or that I dash past the American Revolution in my eagerness to talk about the American Enlightenment’s fascination with the homegrown, allegedly carnivorous mastodon. They are right that some events get short shrift and a very different kind of analysis than appears in most historical studies. Obviously a work like this does not aim to deliver the kind of heaping spoonfuls of nuanced historical fact we expect from good textbooks.
    As a trained historian, I share these concerns. Even a look at the chapter titles suggests that this author is up to no good. But I also worry that the historian’s profession has become deeply problematic because both a younger and older generation have become profoundly disconnected from their putative audience and, in a strange way, from their own topics. Professional historians sometimes see themselves as students and curators of a master narrative. Amateur readers of history, meanwhile, turn to popularly written books on historical subjects because they offer a damn good yarn and literally nothing else.
    Neither of these groups sees themselves as enfolded in history, sometimes as its agents and sometimes as its victims. The average reader keeps reading World War II books as if they tell a clear, uncomplicated story. Grad students learn the ropes and take their comprehensive exams and go on to pass the narrative onto their students (or drop the narrative on them like the metaphorical ton of bricks). None of these groups lets history enrage, implicate, and penetrate them.
    Master narratives are, by definition, lies and untruths. This is why we need to study monsters. They are the things hiding in history’s dark places, the silences that scream if you listen closely enough. Cultural critic Greil Marcus writes that “parts of history, because they don’t fit the story a people wants to tell itself, survive only as haunts and fairy tales, accessible only as specters and spooks.” The secrets and the lies, and perhaps most importantly the victims of history, are in those stories of monsters, those dark places waiting to be explored. These places became dark in the first place because they did not fit the historical story we wanted to tell