"When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundation for a literary tradition which has assumed a lasting role in American culture."--BOOK JACKET. "Yet, while the haunted house motif looms archetypal in the October country of the American mind, literary critics have rarely inquired what it means or why it has endured. These are the questions at the heart of Dale Bailey's American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction."--BOOK JACKET. "Bailey traces the haunted house tale from its origins in English gothic fiction to the paperback potboilers of the present, highlighting the unique significance of the house in the domestic, economic, and social ideologies of our nation. In the hands of the best gothic writers, Bailey concludes, the haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream."--BOOK JACKET.