The wait is finally over! This weekend, a haunting has come to your bookstore. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole is now available in time for a fun Halloween read. 

Beginning next week, Scott will also be traveling to bookstores and other awesome venues, including the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, signing books and talking about monsters. Track his progress and find out when he'll be visiting a city near you at monstersinamerica.com. 

Do you have a book club or group that would like to read Monsters in America? Check out our group and classroom guides at monstersinamerica.com as well, and find out how you can schedule Scott to speak with your group. 

"American evangelicals have long had a complicated relationship with the market." So goes the first sentence of a multi-book review published in the Reviews in American History. Preston Shires's Hippies of the Religious Rightis one of four books reviewed in the essay, published this spring, and is important for is insight into the Jesus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The reviewer writes,

Hippies of the Religious Right is an important resource because of the information that it provides on the Jesus movement, a short-lived evangelical subgroup that unfortunately has received little attention from historians. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of young drug users, left-leaning college students, rock musicians, and long-haired idealists gave up sex and drugs and joined the California-based Jesus movement. They embraced an evangelical version of Christianity that melded a literal interpretation of the Bible with the dress, music, and values of the counterculture. Yet thirty years later, the Jesus People were Republicans. A survey of 800 former Jesus People taken in the early twenty-first century revealed that more than half considered themselves conservative, while very few characterized their politics as liberal (p. 178).

You can read the full review via Project Muse by clicking here. More informtion about Hippies of the Religious Right is availale online.

"Have you ever looked at Frankenstein's monster as a personification of racism after the Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War?" Well, Scott Poole did, and according to the folks over at A Little Dead Podcast, Poole has done his research in constructing one brilliant book:

"Poole is obviously a fan of horror who has done his research. ... This is a great, insightful, and inspiring read. ... It is most definitely a buy. Get a copy and read it, and I'm sure you'll agree with me that it's an awesome text."

You can listen to the entire review online using the link below.

A Little Dead Podcast [see minute 28:55]

From the College of Charleston News & Events page:

College of Charleston history professor Scott Poole grew up in love with monsters. He translated his love for them into a career as a historian, author, and pop culture critic. On October 15, 2011, in the middle of the most monsterific month of the year, Poole will release his sixth book, [Monsters in America:] Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting.

"With Monsters in America, W. Scott Poole has given us a guidebook for a journey into nightmare territory. Insightful and brilliant!" says Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Patient Zero and Dead of Night.

Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Scott Poole has crafted an engrossing, and entirely unique, history of America, one that nimbly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous "other" not only reflects society's fears but shapes actual historical behavior.

The full text of this article can be found here.

Toying with God by Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris was recently reviewed for the journal Numen. The reviewer concluded: "Bado-Fralick and Sachs Norris provide a dense and quite complete study on 'the world of religious games and dolls' in a perspective that will interest not only the study of religions but also other related fields of social and cultural studies."

Find out more about Toying with God and watch the book trailer on its book page, YouTube, or right here.