Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

WASTELAND

W. Scott Poole

The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror

Historian W. Scott Poole traces the confluence of history, technology, and art that gave us modern horror films and literature.

The roots of modern horror are found in the First World War. It was the most devastating event to occur in the early 1900s, with 38 million dead and 17 million wounded in the most grotesque of ways, owing to the new machines brought to war. If Downton Abbey showed the ripple effect of this catastrophe above stairs, Wasteland reveals how bloody battlefields, screaming asylums, and desolated cities and villages made their ways into the darker corners of our psyche.

Historian W. Scott Poole chronicles the era's major figures Freud, T.S. Eliot, H.P. Lovecraft, Wilfred Owen, Peter Lorre, David Cronenberg, and Freddy Kruegeras well as their influences. Wasteland is a surprisingbut wholly convincing perspective on horror that also speaks to the audience for history, film, and popular culture.

November 11th, 2018 is the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that brought World War I to a close, and a number of smart and well-received recent histories have helped us reevaluate this conflict. Now W. Scott Poole takes us behind the frontlines of battle to the dark places of the imagination where the legacy of the War to End All Wars lives on.

W. SCOTT POOLE is a professor of history who teaches and writes about horror and popular culture. His past books include the award-winning Monsters in America and the biography Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee for his critically acclaimed biography of H. P. Lovecraft, In the Mountains of Madness.

Available products
Book Published 2018-10-16 by Counterpoint
Book Published 2018-10-16 by Counterpoint

Comments

Creepy Autumnal Books ... Historian and Bram Stoker Award nominee W. Scott Poole traces the confluence of history, technology, and art that gave us modern horror films and literature. Starting from the Great War, Poole exhaustively traces the evolution of horror and how it was impacted by history. If you are a horror books aficionado then you need this book for your TBP pile. Read more...

Poole writes with empathic insight ... The arc of Wasteland spans wide across the arts ... He writes fluidly and with sharp intent about the traumatized and boundary shattering anxieties shot through the work of the postwar surrealists, the war-inflected apocalyptic racist horror of Lovecraft, and what he sees as the shadow of war in the fiction of Kafka ... His skilled knitting together of a broad range of genres and the spirit of unease permeating them all carries its own salient kind of moral horror.

VICE talked to Poole to find out why the birth of the horror genre was rooted in the destruction of the Great War, how the definition of the word horror evolved over the years, the debt the White Walkers from Game of Thrones owe the conflict, and the images of the fighting that still linger today... Read more...

WASTELAND is the EARPHONES AWARD WINNER, for the audiobook edition "While the descriptions of war can be horrifying indeed, both author and narrator weave an engaging and insightful listen that captures the reality of battle with a sensitive and respectful touch."

Poole brings a scholar's eye to the horror found in literature, film and other artistic expressions ever since [World War I] ... Wasteland will appeal to film and military buffs, horror fans, those interested in popular culture and those who seek a better understanding of the escalating violence of the last 100 years ... A fascinating read.

PopMatters runs Scott's original essay Read more...

More than just a book for fans of Stephen King, this is a must read for everyone who wonders how and why a generation's fear created the 21st century.

..., Poole lays out the foundations of modern horror cinema in this wonderfully informative book. I could not get enough!

...this is an intelligent and wide-ranging profile of the long, traumatic, and ultimately formative relationship between war and horror -- and if current events are any indication, it's a timely profile too.

Seeking the roots of society's fascination and obsession with horror, Poole lands on World War I. The unimaginable carnage and obliteration of life wrought by that war, according to Poole, impacted artists in their creation of horror novels and films, and, more dangerously, infected cultures, breeding Nazism, totalitarianism, and fascism.

blog interview with W. Scott Poole on WASTELAND Read more...

WASTELAND is Longlisted for the BRAM STOKER AWARD for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction Read more...

[A] fascinating new book about how [World War I] reshaped western culture ... Poole is a very gifted writer.

Poole brings a scholar's eye and a devotee's heart to a study of the literary, film, and artistic incarnations of horror from the World War I period to today.

TORONTO STAR runs a feature on W. Scott Poole Read more...

The hunger for horror, the almost compulsive need to relive and re-experience the trauma, and the irrevocable mark on the landscape of our psychology and pop culture, Poole is dead on with sharp analysis and drinkable prose.

Elegantly written and cogently argued, Wasteland convincingly demonstrates the modern horror genre's origins in the great Dance of Death that was the First World War.

W. Scott Poole combines smart readings of the horror classics with detailed knowledge of 20th century history, art, and literature to dig deep into the serious side of these popular entertainments. I thought I already knew the subject inside out, but Wasteland introduced me to fresh facts, new ideas, and surprising connections. This is cultural history of a very high order: intelligent, lively, and wonderfully readable.

This is a book that might appear to be geared toward fans of horror, but anyone interested in history or cultural studies will find Poole's thorough analysis fascinating.

Wasteland, W. Scott Poole's exploration of some of the Great War's consequences for popular art, is fully attuned to the conflict's devastating psychological impact ... Highly persuasive ... Poole's general conclusions about World War I's transformation into art, and the process of psychological displacement that accompanied it, are incontestable. Read more...

WASHINGTON POST includes WASTELAND in a roundup of the "Best Books to Take You Off the Beaten Track" Read more...

Literary Hub includes an excerpt in their favorite stories of 2018: "... It's not a reassuring year-end read, but it does seem important (especially at the end of a year like 2018) to contemplate how large-scale violence can bleed into the psyche of an entire generation, unsettling humanity in unforeseen and far-reaching ways." Read more...

[T]horoughly engrossing cultural study . . . Poole persuasively argues that the birth of horror as a genre is rooted in the unprecedented destruction and carnage of WWI . . . will make it hard for readers who haven't considered the wartime context for horror's emergence to forget it. Read more...