Amanda Haggard

NonfictionHistoryCultural HistoryCultural CriticismArts & Culture

American Scary

Review by Amanda Haggard

Any horror writer doing their job knows how to tap into the fears that plague us most. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond provides a robust account of how art has reflected American dread for centuries. As it turns out, our history is rife with foundational fear, making it prime territory for some scary storytelling. 

Dauber starts his “tour of American fear” with our country’s bloody beginnings and proclivity for blaming the devil for everything from bad weather to miscarriage (hello, Salem!). He then passes through slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and beyond to more contemporary paranoias reflected in film: murderous technology (The Terminator), individual indifference (the Final Destination series) and surveillance (Paranormal Activity), to name a few. 

One of his strongest examples illuminates the anxieties of women living in the late 19th century with Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” In the story, when a woman is told that her husband has died in an accident, her reaction is one of great, unexpected joy and an overwhelming sense of liberation. Just when you think that’s the end of the tale, she discovers the news was given in error: Her husband is still very much alive. The tale ends with her death, which somehow feels less tragic than her loss of freedom. “Chopin’s most pressing contributions to the American fearfulness,” writes Dauber, “. . . consist of the suggestion that liberation, at least for women, is impossible; that, in the end, that sort of awakening . . . is but an illusion.”

Clocking in at over 400 pages with an at-times academic approach, American Scary may come off a bit intimidating at first. But for lovers of all things macabre, the book is worth its weight. Dauber’s attention to the details of myriad cultural touchstones, both famous and obscure, will entice those who care to tiptoe deeper into the darkest of the dark. Dauber acknowledges as well that things in the real world are often scarier than the stories we tell; it’s not a new take, but it’s one he makes exceptionally well. 

American Scary’s greatest success is making readers consider what art may be born of our late-night anxieties. Spooky stuff, huh?

 

The rigorous yet still enticing American Scary invites readers to peer into the horror show of American history through the lens of literature and film.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Way That Leads Among the Lost

Review by Amanda Haggard

When anthropologist and Stanford University professor Angela Garcia went to Mexico City to study a new urban development, she instead discovered families threatened by the violence of the drug war committing themselves or their family members to anexos, coercive drug rehab programs run out of private homes. There, staff members inflict beatings and emotional abuse unironically called “treatment.”

The chance that you’ve heard of an anexos is slim; a quick Google search elicits few results, the top result of which is an academic paper by Garcia herself. In her new book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, she studies these complicated places and the social forces that have created them. Based on direct observation and interviews with people living in several such run-down centers, Garcia shows the diverse experiences that brought them there: A trans woman named Sheila self-admitted and becomes a den mother to young teen residents; an introverted 14-year-old with the nickname Catorce was dropped off by his mother before she left town; and teenage Daniel was violently apprehended after his desperate mother called an anexos for help about his drug addiction.

The stories of anexados vary, but the essential reason the centers exist is the same: The violence inside the walls of an anexos is less frequent and severe than that outside. As Garcia observes life in these makeshift drug rehab centers, she reckons with her own past abandonments, familial addiction and homelessness. Garcia is careful not to run a straight line from the violence of these programs to the healing of their participants. More often than not, people either spend long periods of time living in the anexos, or they are in and out of them as they vacillate between safety and danger, flush and broke.

Yet anexos serve a purpose to many in the communities where they exist. Garcia reflects on the pain many parents feel sending their children to anexos, knowing they’ll suffer violence within, but otherwise unable to keep them from the threat posed by the drug war in their neighborhoods. The Way That Leads Among the Lost is both a heavy and enlightening history of how anexos came to be, and a compassionate look into the lives of those impacted.

Correction, April 23, 2024: This review previously misstated the name of author Angela Garcia.

The Way That Leads Among the Lost investigates the heavy yet enlightening history of anexos, clandestine Mexico City drug recovery centers.
NonfictionMemoir

The Mango Tree

Review by Amanda Haggard

As we grow, we come to reckon with the pieces of ourselves that originate from the people who raised us. The realization can be both empowering and painful as we recognize the good and ugly traits we’ve absorbed and the lessons our parents imparted that we took to heart. In The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, Annabelle Tometich untangles her identity in light of the unbearable moments she experienced being raised by a struggling and often enraged Filipino mother, and the loss of her white father who died during her childhood, taking with him the upper-middle-class privilege that he afforded her.

“All I wanted as a child was to be normal, to hide my weird family, their weird deaths and weird antics behind a big GPA and a spot as captain of the swim team,” she writes. “As an adult, I still strive for this ideal, knowing full well the impossibility of it.”

Her memoir begins in a Florida courtroom where her mother faces a felony charge for shooting out a man’s window in retaliation for picking a mango from her tree. The case, and tree, are a touchstone throughout the book as Tometich navigates her life story. Her mother and father fought mercilessly before his death. After her mother was left to parent on her own and went to work as a nurse, Tometich helped raise her younger siblings.

Tometich, now a food writer, started her career in medical school, then worked as a chef, and eventually landed a job at the sports desk at The News Press in Fort Myers, Florida. Here, she got the dreaded call from a co-worker about her mother’s court case. Anyone with a less than normal family can relate.

Not-so-perfect family dynamics—and the wounds that emerge from them—are popular literary fuel because of their universality. Yet it’s rare to see an author give an honest account of every bit of it, which in this case includes added layers of tragedy, racism and class struggle: the sting of hearing her grandmother use a slur against her mother, the bittersweetness of seeing her mother care for Tometich’s own child, the reckoning about the harm that was intended as good parenting. And, of course, the moment Tometich comes to recognize that it really is impossible to separate herself from her upbringing. In the end, The Mango Tree reminds us that all trees derive strength from their roots.

Annabelle Tometich’s memoir, The Mango Tree, may be about a fractured mother-daughter relationship, but it also understands that all trees derive strength from their roots.

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