Subjectively, what horrifies a person changes depending on whom you ask. But as a nation, what has collectively horrified the United States—like so many other things—is strikingly clear in hindsight. In his immense new release, American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, Jeremy Dauber chronicles what has horrified Americans through the ages, linking key historical events to the cultural output of each period in question up to now.
We begin with the new versus the long established, AKA Native, American—when the Puritans landed ashore in a world New only to them, and allowed their religiosity and hopes of realizing some grand destiny to engender an overwhelming, dangerous fear of the unknown. Though we typically understand fear as something we fall prey to, Dauber takes care to highlight the ways in which it has historically been weaponized by figures in power to maintain their authority. Among the greatest horrors in a nation invaded by Christian zealots was, of course, succumbing to Satan’s duplicity. The pervasive fear of unwittingly falling into sin is harnessed impressively in these lines from a poem quoted by Dauber near the start of the book, composed by one Thomas Till, entitled “Upon the First Sight of New England, June 29, 1638”:
But yet beware of Satan’s wily baits;
He lurks among you, cunningly he waits
To catch you from me.
Keeping the title in mind, this fear was one carried over the sea from the old world which succeeded in infecting the new. And Satan, trickster that he is, was capable of taking innumerable forms, including those native to this “new” land. Dauber provides a number of examples of “captivity narratives” graphically written both by those who had survived Native American capture as well as those who took it upon themselves to imagine the experience as a means to keep their flocks pure. There are repeated mentions of “scalping” and other “savage” acts. Funnily enough, the natives are given credit where the Puritans feel it is due. One General Bouquet remarks in his account of the “Ohio Indians” and their captivity practices: “No child is otherwise treated by the persons adopting it than the children of their own body […] The perpetual slavery of those captivated in war, is a notion which even their barbarity has not yet suggested to them.” And here, Dauber knows what you must be thinking and says so: “The barbarity of perpetual slavery, indeed.”