This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

A dashing portrait of General Giuseppe Garibaldi filled the front page of the June 9, 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly while an accompanying article fêted “the hero of the new Italian war,” extolling the “wonders” of his fight for freedom on two continents. “Of all the Italian patriots of 1848 he is, without a doubt, the ablest, most sensible, and most respectable,” Harper’s enthused, praising his certain success in this “new” attempt to unify the Italian peninsula as one state.1 Harper’s proved to be wrong – Italy didn’t unify until 1870 – but this minor setback did little to dampen American enthusiasm for the principled military strategist.2 After meeting the hero that same summer, Henry Adams observed to his brother Charles that Garibaldi “looked in his red shirt like the very essence and genius of revolution, as he is.”3 In comments such as these, as in the numerous celebrations of his character that appeared in the 1850s, Garibaldi embodies the ideals of republican revolution; no need to fear either a turn to terror or divided loyalties with such a “sensible” revolutionary leading the charge.

This essay focuses on two very different authors – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Theodore Winthrop (1828–1861) – whose novels show a wide range of intense, perverse, or unruly emotional and erotic attachments. The essay contrasts these authors to highlight the emergence of forms of shame, punishment, and discipline that were becoming dominant in the mid-nineteenth century. But the essay also shows the emergence of affective and erotic communities that were collective, sharing a coded language, forms of self-protection, and cultural companionship. These novels, in other words, demonstrate sexuality’s emergence not only in terms of individual bodies but also in those collective bodies known as subcultures.

Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic choices make him as anachronistic and difficult to place as are many of his characters. While he shares some of the thematic preoccupations of modernism and postmodernism, he lacks most of the aesthetic markers of those movements. Given his varied style, it might be more promising to think of his work as hovering aesthetically between the naturalistic and the phantasmagoric in the manner of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s romance tradition. His aesthetic borrowings from the medium of film similarly seem to place his work in a grey area between objectivity and subjectivity. While McCarthy’s own consistent associations of aesthetic value with pain and loss contrast sharply with the disinterested conception of beauty propounded by Kant, his work seems much more attuned to Kant’s other source of aesthetic value, the sublime. But McCarthy’s version of the sublime is thoroughly naturalized and historicized, embracing human fragility and contingency. This aspect of McCarthy’s aesthetic, linked as it is to the cultural attitudes born of the nineteenth-century encounter between late Romanticism and naturalism, might help account for many readers’ sense that McCarthy’s work belongs to another time.