The horror novel appears in the late twentieth century as a significant genre of popular fiction. Growing out of older traditions of the European Gothic and weird fiction, and their trajectory through American literature, the horror novel has produced some of the most famous names in writing, such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Debates about the literary merits of horror have been frequent, but the genre undoubtedly holds an important place in fiction and in American culture more widely. The politics of the horror novel, then, are crucial. This chapter traces the history of critical commentary on the political position of horror, asking if it upholds or questions the status quo. It also moves beyond this model to examine modern transformations of the genre and self-conscious literary responses to the legacy of racism and misogyny that has been a subject of critique. Covering the horror novel’s response to varied social changes, including immigration, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, this chapter argues that it is capable of both reflecting on and exploiting social fears, and that its politics are as varied as its form, which has far more variety than narrow genre definitions might suggest.

Modern Black horror literature and film depict the complex mechanisms of social death threatening contemporary African Americans. Drawing on slavery to metaphorize social death, texts like Linden Hills and Stigmata, films such as The House Invictus and popular media like Lovecraft Country and “This Is America” also reveal how the lure of the American Dream seduces African Americans into colluding in their own suffering and the suffering of others like them. Yet even as slavery is presented as a point of historical horror, it is also presented as a source of ancestral knowledge, as African American artists rewrite the history of Black slave resistance to urge modern audiences to a much needed and long-overdue revolution.

This chapter discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts influenced the American popular Gothic during the post-war era. The 1950s and 1960s were what Nathan G. Hale has described as the ‘Golden Age of Popularization’ for psychoanalytic thought in the United States. The historical underpinnings of this psychoanalytic ‘boom’ period are discussed, with a focus upon the prominent place occupied by American ego psychology during this period. As argued, this influence soon permeated the ‘popular Gothic’ fiction of the era, which was characterised by texts which revolved around tensions rooted in the dysfunctional nuclear family, sexual and emotional repression, and unresolved childhood trauma. The work of authors such as Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, William March and Ira Levin is considered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the late 1970s ‘Satanic Panic’ scare, which drew upon both core psychoanalytic principles and the most lurid elements found in works of horror fiction such as Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971), severely damaged the movement’s reputation in the United States.