American Nightmares

American Nightmares
Author: Dale Bailey
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2011-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 029926873X

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 that has assumed a lasting role in American culture. “The House of Usher” and its literary progeny have not lacked for tenants in the century and a half since: writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted houses of American fiction. Dale 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. The author concludes that the haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream.

The House Next Door

The House Next Door
Author: Anne Rivers Siddons
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2007-07-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416553444

The house next door to the Kennedys appears to be haunted by an all-pervasive evil, and the couple watches as a succession of owners becomes engulfed by the sinister force, until the Kennedys set out to destroy the house themselves.

Nightmare House

Nightmare House
Author: Douglas Clegg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2004
Genre: Haunted houses
ISBN: 9780843951776

There are places that hold in the traces of evil, houses that become legendary for the mysteries and secrets within their walls. Harrow is one such house. Psychic manifestations, poltergeist activity, hallucinations, and othe rresidue of terror have all been documented in Harrow. It has been called Nightmare House. It is a nest for the restless spirits of the dead.

The Nightmare Room #1: Don't Forget Me!

The Nightmare Room #1: Don't Forget Me!
Author: R.L. Stine
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2009-10-06
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0061756954

Danielle Warner was only pretending to hypnotize her brother Peter. So why is Peter acting so strange... so terrifying? Doesn't Peter realize it was all a joke? Danielle and her brother are about to learn a frightening lesson: It's not a good idea to kid around—in The Nightmare Room.

Nightmares!

Nightmares!
Author: Jason Segel
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0385384033

"Coraline meets Monsters, Inc. in this delightfully entertaining offering from actor [Jason] Segel and co-author [Kirsten] Miller."—Publishers Weekly The hilariously frightening, middle-grade novel Nightmares! is a Texas Bluebonnet nominee and the first book in a trilogy about a boy named Charlie and a group of kids who must face their fears to save their town. Sleeping has never been so scary. And now waking up is even worse! Charlie Laird has several problems. 1. His dad married a woman he is sure moonlights as a witch. 2. He had to move into her purple mansion, which is NOT a place you want to find yourself after dark. 3.He can’t remember the last time sleeping wasn’t a nightmarish prospect. Like even a nap. What Charlie doesn’t know is that his problems are about to get a whole lot more real. Nightmares can ruin a good night’s sleep, but when they start slipping out of your dreams and into the waking world—that’s a line that should never be crossed. And when your worst nightmares start to come true . . . well, that’s something only Charlie can face. And he’s going to need all the help he can get, or it might just be lights-out for Charlie Laird. For good. Praise for Nightmares! Book one is a New York Times bestseller and Texas Bluebonnet nominee! "Charlie Laird, who learns fear will eat you alive if you feed it, makes an impression, and...readers will want to accompany him again."—The New York Times Book Review "A touching comical saga...about facing things that go bump in the night."—US Weekly "“[Nightmares!] succeeds at scaring and amusing in equal measure…[It's] sweet, charming, and imaginative."—Kirkus Reviews "Segel...and Miller build an entertaining, cartoony world full of scary (but not too scary) monsters, silly jokes, plucky kid heroes...with a promise of adventures to come."—Booklist "An engaging and creative story...woven with a generous amount [of] humor."—VOYA "There's humor and a fairly high ick-factor."—School Library Journal "Cleverly crafted...This novel presents just the right mix of 'scary and humorous.'"—ILA Literacy Daily

In the Dream House

In the Dream House
Author: Carmen Maria Machado
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644451026

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares

The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares
Author: Jason Blum
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2015-07-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385540000

Original and terrifying fiction presented by Jason Blum, the award-winning producer behind the groundbreaking Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious, and Sinister franchises. Jason Blum invited sixteen cutting-edge collaborators, filmmakers, and writers to envision a city of their choosing, and let their demons run wild. The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City brings together all-new, boundary-breaking stories from such artists as Ethan Hawke (Boyhood), Eli Roth (Hostel), Scott Derrickson (Sinister), C. Robert Cargill (Sinister), James DeMonaco (The Purge), and many others. “Geist” by Les Bohem…“Procedure” by James DeMonaco…“Hellhole” by Christopher Denham…“A Clean White Room” by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill…“Novel Fifteen” by Steve Faber…“Eyes” by George Gallo…“1987” by Ethan Hawke…“Donations” by William Joselyn…“The Old Jail” by Sarah Langan…“The Darkish Man” by Nissar Modi…“Meat Maker” by Mark Neveldine…“Dreamland” by Michael Olson…“Valdivia” by Eli Roth…“Golden Hour” by Jeremy Slater…“The Leap” by Dana Stevens…“The Words” by Scott Stewart…“Gentholme” by Simon Kurt Unsworth

Underwater

Underwater
Author: Ryan Dezember
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1250241812

Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors. In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess. A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.