The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (review)

Although the suburbs have become a dominant space in both the U.S. housing market and in the American popular imagination, few literary critics have studied the fictions they inspire. Bernice M. Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture not only offers an important addition to this under-explored field, but also indicates the need for further analysis of the genre. The books, films, and television shows that Murphy examines reveal skepticism toward the rapid expansion of post-war suburbs, and an anxiety about the conformity, materialism, and ecological damage they bring. This anxiety lends itself well to horror and supernatural plots, in which "one is almost always in more danger from the people in the house next door, or one's own family, than from external threats" (2). While she rightly contradicts social critics like Lewis Mumford, who portrayed suburban sprawl as an inherently corruptive force, Murphy does claim that the widespread growth of suburbia has not been accompanied by a proper examination of its demands and effects. This lack of reflection necessitates the study of suburban fiction, as the frequent use of horror tropes reveals lingering concerns about community and belonging in post-war America.

The book's first chapter positions Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson as foundational authors of the Suburban Gothic, as they transplant traditional monsters from European castles to American ranch houses, and use them to describe changes in middle-class life. As demonstrated by the observation that Jackson does not frame suburbia as "the cause of [her characters'] selfishness, but rather a reflection of it," Murphy never dismisses suburbanites as intrinsically vapid or unethical, but approaches them as people constructing a life in a relatively new environment (19). This distinction allows her to emphasize the pathos in otherwise sensational or pulpy narratives, like the witch and zombie stories discussed in chapters two and three. Chapter two associates the witches in TV's Bewitched and in the films Jack's Wife and The Conjure Wife with the development of strict gender roles, and chapter three argues that the novels The Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers explore the perils of identity formation in an atmosphere of uniformity. Although the readings in these chapters do highlight terrible acts inflicted on suburbanites, the stories rarely feature a specific villain, save the Stepford husbands. Rather, their horror stems from a fear of the unknown, whether that be a neighbor's secrets or an inability to recognize one's self.

Conversely, chapters four and five focus on stories with clear monsters, transferring the horror from the unknown to the unimaginable. Murphy recognizes that "suburbanites in American popular culture are seldom menaced by a terrible 'other' of alien origin: instead, they tend to be violently dispatched by one of their own, often a murderous family member" (136). This observation introduces the book's most compelling analyses, in which Murphy contrasts the modern haunted house to the serial killer, arguing that the latter is a uniquely suburban figure. In chapter four, Murphy locates Jay Anson's novel The Amityville Horror and Tobe Hooper's film Poltergeist within a tradition that includes Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, which all feature stories about stolen land and maddened homeowners. These contemporary fictions illustrate the cost of the push for modernity so often associated with suburban upward mobility: although real estate agents and advertisements for home appliances accentuate newness and a disregard for the past, these stories suggest that the "ghosts of the murdered and the wronged actually do haunt the suburbs with surprising frequency" (104). Where these hauntings are often retribution for the misdeeds of someone other than the homeowner, the slasher films discussed in chapter five emphasize homegrown fiends. Beginning with Michael Meyers of John Carpenter's Halloween, Murphy associates the serial killer with the fear of one's neighbors: Meyers is the boy next door gone horribly wrong, who uses his parents' house and the masks of...