Join us for a book launch celebration exploring modern horror and the origins of American Empire with W. Scott Poole and Mari N. Crabtree! Get tickets here!

Buxton Books is thrilled to host a publication day celebration for W. Scott Poole’s new book, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of the American Empire. Poole - College of Charleston professor in American politics and popular culture, author or co-author of nine books, and Bram Stoker Award nominee - will be in conversation with Dr. Mari N. Crabtree, associate professor of African American Studies at College of Charleston. Dark Carnivals is the panoramic story of how the horror genre transformed into one of the most incisive critiques of unchecked American imperial power, and these two brilliant scholars and writers will dive deep into exactly what that means. The evening’s program will also include and audience Q&A and Poole will be signing and personalizing book. THIS EVENT IS FREE WITH STUDENT ID.

This is an in-store event. Doors for the program will open at 5:00 pm with the conversation to begin at 5:30 pm. Tickets are available here!

ABOUT DARK CARNIVALS:

The panoramic story of how the horror genre transformed into one of the most incisive critiques of unchecked American imperial power

The American empire emerged from the shadows of World War II. As the nation’s influence swept the globe with near impunity, a host of evil forces followed—from racism, exploitation, and military invasion to killer clowns, flying saucers, and monsters borne of a fear of the other. By viewing American imperial history through the prism of the horror genre, Dark Carnivals lays bare how the genre shaped us, distracted us, and gave form to a violence as American as apple pie.

A carnival ride that connects the mushroom clouds of 1945 to the beaches of Amity Island, Charles Manson to the massacre at My Lai, and John Wayne to John Wayne Gacy, the new book by acclaimed historian W. Scott Poole reveals how horror films and fictions have followed the course of America’s military and cultural empire and explores how the shadow of our national sins can take on the form of mass entertainment.

ABOUT W. SCOTT POOLE:

W. Scott Poole teaches courses in American politics and popular culture. He is the author or co-author of nine books, including Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (2011; revised edition 2018) that won the John Cawelti award for best textbook dealing with popular culture. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee for his 2016 biography of H.P. Lovecraft, In the Mountains of Madness.

His most recent book is Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror (2018) looks at the lives of directors, artists, and writers who collectively created the culture of contemporary horror. Wasteland was chosen for “notable book” lists by The New York Post, The Toronto Free Star, and the Indie Booksellers“Indie Next” list.

Poole’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, PopMatters, Jacobin, and People’s World,as well as in academic essay collections including, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019).

He tweets about horror and history @monstersamerica.

ABOUT MARI N. CRABTREE:

Mari N. Crabtree is an associate professor of African American Studies and previously was a visiting research scholar with Princeton University's Department of African American Studies. She specializes in African American culture and history, in particular how the African American cultural tradition has shaped African American struggles for freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book, My Soul is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, will be published in 2022 by Yale University Press as part of the New Directions in Narrative History series. This monograph unearths how African Americans lived through and beyond traumatic memories of lynching in the mid-twentieth century US South. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative responses to lynching, this book develops a theory of African American trauma that uses the sensibility of the blues as its central metaphor. She also has written essays for Raritan, Rethinking History, Contemporaries, and an edited volume, Reconstruction at 150. Currently, she is working on a new book project that examines the pleasures and political utility of guile, deception, and humor in the African American cultural tradition titled Shuffling Like Uncle Tom, Thinking Like Nat Turner: Humor, Deception, and Irony in the African American Cultural Tradition.

Professor Crabtree teaches courses on African American music, mass incarceration, collective memories of racial violence, the life and writings of James Baldwin, and Afro-Asian cultural and political connections.

This is a ticketed event! Grab your tickets here!