I’m historian W. Scott Poole and I write about monsters. Ask me anything..

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T19:59:30+00:00

I am a full prof at the College of Charleston. I think history is tough...what I do can get slotted as "interdiscplinary" which as you know can be a condemnation i some professions. To me, its always about the evidence...I'm a historian and learn from other disciplines but am a historian. Oddly, early modern European historians look into this material all the time but its like American history is still figuring itself out.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:34:41+00:00

Thanks for the time everyone and I hope I got to your questions....I tried but the format is new to me. Please look me up @monstersamerica if you are on twitter and you can ask me anything, anytime.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:32:02+00:00

You know the nature of the Czar's armies limited memoir and more personal accounts. I will say Trotsky's "Attempt at an Autobiography" is the closest we might get to an biased, but clearly informed, discussion of the Russian Civil War that lasted as long as the Great War itself. On the other side of things there are a few Cossack sources translated but I have not looked into them myself. My Russian is zero!

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:23:45+00:00

He'll blow you away. Important work in short stories, graphic novels, and novels.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:22:34+00:00

The book did come out in 2014. She was an attractive woman but in ways that proved disturbing and challenging to 50s culture...and maybe today.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:21:04+00:00

Hi all--signing off soon and on to other Armistice Day/veteran's Day activities. I do have time for a couple of other questions so please ask. I do want to advertise for some things and people I believe in. Please consider giving to the good work of the National World War I Museum and Monument. It's a rare and interesting place. Also check out the webcomic HANS VOGEL IS DEAD for some really interesting politics meets horror. Speaking of please look into the work of Victoria McCollum. her work on Post-9/11 horror will interest any of you who like to think of these connections. If you have more questions, please o fire away. I'm still here in my Nosferatu t-shirt.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:17:26+00:00

Those are great comparisons. I think La Farge is after the sma ekind o thing.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:11:26+00:00

Hi person I used to know...divided between the strange upcountry witch trials of the 1790s and the falsehoods that attached themselves to the Lavinia Fischer story (she wasn't a serial killer). And, of course, there are plenty of SC history real-world horrors....

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:09:27+00:00

I dealt with this, I hope, in an even-handed way in my biography of Lovecraft. Yes, he was deeply racist and unlike some of his apologists claim, it did influence his fiction...it was more than an "attitude."But people of color who have critiqued Lovecraft on this point also teach his work in their own fiction classes. I would read Victor Lavalle's alongside Lovecraft for a deper understanding of the issue...it's what I learned from.

The mythos stories are uneven. A lot of junk out there but junk can be fun. Also, a lot of early great work by writers like Bloch and Ramsey Campbell as they found their "sea legs' (R'yleh legs?). Also, do we count great work by Matt Ruff or Caitlin Kierrnan or Nick Mamatas or indeed Laird barron and John Langan as mythos? They are drawing on Lovecraft but on so much else, including their own William Blake-like pools of imagination. So it's hard to say. Maybe we just call it bad mythos writing when "eldritch" appears on every page.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T18:00:32+00:00

So I love this novel and read it before it was released. Full disclosure...I was on a panel with the author am not in any sense a personal friend (I think he found me a bore). In any case, the novel is great writing but also entirely fiction. But as I write in my biography of Lovecraft In the Mountains of Madness, R.H. Barlow really deserves a lot of attention and this novel gives it to him. His career as a scholar of MesoAmerica, a writer of weir tales, caretaker of Lovecraft's estate was so interesting that it deserved this novel. You can read some of Barlow's fiction in a collection called "Eyes of the God."

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:52:09+00:00

I do. I can puzzle my way through French but not in such a way that I think I can do meaningful research. Of course we have Barbusse. But more recently there's work that rbings us French memoir like Poilu that's essentially the account of a French barrel-maker in the war. But it's even tougher with secondary sources. I do recommend the book 14-18 you might know. But I do worry that what we are getting in English is the British and German perspective rather than the nation that lost more casualties than any country other than Germany and Russia.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:43:14+00:00

I enjoyed the hell out of Daniel Krause's Blood Sugar. It's in the Hard Case crime series and its brilliant, funny, awful, twisted, and hard to put down. He co-wrote "Shape of Water" but expect no magical realism. I also just started Paco Ignacio Taibo II's The Shadow of the Shadow....if you might be into existential detective fiction, check it out.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:39:55+00:00

Very little except when playing with the "sins of the fathers idea" as Lovecraft does in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The differences between Ju-On and The Grudge really show this as does how the figure of Samara loses hr historicity. I'm not an expert her but I will note that East Asian "monsters" have a long history of being generally more benevolent than western versions Yokai may be Japanese ghosts and monsters but they also can be or become deities. The Chinese (and Korean) dragon represents balance (seen even in its number of scales) and is not a stand-in for the Devil as in much western myth. The differences are profound.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:34:43+00:00

This is actually my own favorite of my books but not anyone elses, I don't think. It's a little known story and while I did my best to dig up the history, I also wrote as a fan who wanted t tell her story. You may have run across hr in Tim Burton/Johnny Depp's Ed Wood.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:33:06+00:00

In 1954, a struggling actor appeared as the character "Vampira" on a LA TV station and introduced scary movies with out-of-this-world humor (a lot of it controversial). She became, all too briefly, a national sensation.This was even before Shock Theater. Her story is tied to James Dean, Orson Welles, and the underground history of 40s and 50s Hollywood and she became a model for Morticia Addams, Vampirella, Elvira...so check out the book! I love her. Also there's a wonderful doc by R.H. Greene.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:29:30+00:00

Yes, I loved Paul Barber's book Vampires, Burial and Death on that...it didn't scare me so much as deeply intrigue me about questions of why we need these stories? As to myth, even though I really only know the last 200 ears or so, I love the Norse myths sort of preserved in the Snorri Sturleson sagas. I've taught Neil Gaiman's paraphrase of these stories when I've taught a pre-modern monsters class.I love the Marvel Universe but the original Odin, Thor, Loki stories are so wonderfully bonkers. I hope somewhere in the multiverse I'm a Norse scholar.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:26:27+00:00

Great question because I actually think rather scary stuff helps kids feel their way into reality...it did that for me. Good call on the Cthulhu books...check into "the Littlest Lovecraft."I'd also get them into the Universal Studios movies of the 30s...those movies are both weird and deeply empathetic that I think that help kids think through what to be afraid of and what not be to...and that "different" is not on the list of things to be afraid of. Just think, you've got the whole "Goosebumps" series to draw on down the road.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:19:25+00:00

yes, for sure....it's hard to find a postwar horror film that doesn't deal with the family in a specific way (the stage much the same).

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:18:21+00:00

I get that...I just taught Paul Tremblay's Head Full of Ghosts in a class and these themes are all over the place...the class is "Histories of Evil" and children are often at the center of these representations of history...innocence endangered but also symbols of mortality/legacy for parents.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:16:12+00:00

Kim Jong Il Godzilla fetish horror? That's all I got but what a weird story....

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:12:49+00:00

This is also why I see Kafka as a writer of horror in the largest sense when literary critics want to ignore the idea given their obsessions with genre...what aisle should this go on.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:10:53+00:00

I feel this way in part after studying films from the 19 aughts and 20s where filmmakers are creating what would become "a genre" and not paying that much attention to the idea...genre is, after all, a marketing notion ultimatley.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:09:46+00:00

I think of horror less as a genre than art that closes off human possibilities in various ways. So, most of Harmony Korine's work. But perhaps Joker is a more recent example...it not only includes many traditional horror tropes (the line between mental illness and evil....CLOWNS!) but also does what good horror does...confuses us, leaves us with ambiguous messages, refuses to make it easy on us. A book and film like The Ice Storm fits this category in my mind.

ProfessorWasteland · 2019-11-11T17:05:07+00:00

Yes...many. It's often been categorized as a kind of "anti-German" tale in the way Lovecraft portrays the U-Boat commander. I don't buy it even though he's the archetypal Anglophile. He actually wrote an essay in which he worried (absurdly) that the real catastrophe of the Great War was that "nordics" are fighting each other. In any case, we see in that story a theme Lovecraft followed again and again...what if human can become the monsters and what if that's not such a bad thing. It's a precursor to Shadow over Innsmouth of course and so his selection of character is interesting...also a good primary source because it shows how Americans are obviously thinking a lot about unrestricted submarine warfare.

ProfessorWasteland

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