Book Review:

Review of Scott Brewster and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's The Routledge Introduction to the American Ghost Story. Routledge Introductions to American Literature. Routledge, 2025. 166 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: 978-0367461157) Paperback (ISBN: 978-0367461140). Kindle (ASIN: B0D5K16WB7).

In their monograph, Scott Brewster and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock trace nearly five centuries of American societal fears and expectations through exemplary ghost stories. Starting with anxieties that emerge with the colonization of the continent, the genocide of its indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Africans, the authors show how these representations shift in the nineteenth century’s subjective turn, in which a large swath of authors turn ghost narratives inward on the self, and then to worries about the legacy of American imperialism, starting in the twentieth century. The authors do not make a similarly cohesive theory of American societal preoccupations in the twenty first century and instead present a myriad of stories that show the complexities of ghosts and their tales in recent history.

The first chapter, titled “A Pre-History of the American Ghost Story,” briefly covers the history of ghosts and ghost narratives from the seventeenth century and earlier in North America. Brewster and Weinstock discuss the Puritan and British origins of ghost stories, as well as the large impact on white narratives of ghosts from American indigenous and enslaved African storytelling and religion. The authors cite Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021) as an exemplar of American ghost storytelling as a means of highlighting and discussing injustice.

The second chapter covers American ghost stories in the nineteenth century. Various trends in American history shaped nineteenth-century ghost stories, like the creation of Spiritualism, debates over the epistemological status of religion and science, and the construction and maintenance of nationalist narratives and nation-building. The perceived “newness” of the United States was an obstacle for (white colonizing) authors to overcome, and, as this work argues, many overcame the challenge. Authors like Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others draw on various concerns and anxieties of nineteenth-century Americans, especially those about race, gender, and class, to construct haunting ghost stories with a “subjective turn”—a preoccupation with ideas about the self, consciousness, and so on.

The third and fourth chapters examine ghost stories from the twentieth century. Beginning with Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Brewster and Weinstock argue that twentieth-century ghost stories faced concerns like altered states of consciousness, doubts over the reality of ghosts and hauntings, and the “tension between rationality and superstition” (40). Chapter 3 particularly focuses on the American haunted house, examining the works of Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, and others. Chapter 4 covers ghost stories told by marginalized people in the United States, starting with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and expanding to cover works by Gloria Naylor, Lousie Erdrich, Amy Tan, and many others. Chapter 3 argues that for many ghost narratives, ghosts are viewed as either a disruption of the natural order or “metaphors for the past’s pathological persistence into the present” (69). Chapter 4 argues that for many other ghost story writers, ghosts become a natural consequence of the past, usually a deeply troubled past like African enslavement. For many, the worlds between the living and the dead are closely connected, a rejoinder to western post-Enlightenment rationalism (87).

The fifth chapter refocuses on American ghosts in film and television. Brewster and Weinstock argue that ghosts here function somewhat similarly to that of written stories: they represent national anxieties and desires about society in some way. The difference is that ghosts in these media are immediately visual to the audience, rather than imagined through text on a page. Visual depictions of ghosts depend heavily on genre, but they usually fall under three categories: ghosts as non-human monsters, ghosts as monstrous humans, and ghosts as non-monstrous humans. Ghost narratives come in four forms on screen: ghosts as unaware, purposeful, implacable, and fantastical. Some films discussed in this chapter include the 1938 adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Casper (1995), Crimson Peak (2015), and We Are Still Here (2015). Television shows include The Ghost Whisperer (2005–2010), The X-Files (1993–2002), and Supernatural (2005–2020). Some consideration is made for ghost hunting shows as well.

The final chapter contends with “digital ghosts,” those stories that are told through various forms of new media, focusing on podcasts, creepypastas, and video games. Brewster and Weinstock examine podcasts like Palimpsest (2017–present), The Way We Haunt Now (2020–present), and Welcome to Night Vale (2012–present), and argue that podcasts present a variety of forms of ghosts and ghost stories for listeners, despite the near complete dependence on audio to portray these spirits. Creepypastas—a portmanteau of “creepy” and “copypasta,” a brief text meant to be copied and pasted online—are user-generated stories posted to various websites like 4chan, Reddit, and dedicated sites like Creepypasta.com. Stories like “Ben Drowned” and “My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook” are analyzed. Finally, Brewster and Weinstock examine a variety of video games, including The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), The Blackwell Legacy (2006), The Sims series, Among Us (2018), and Murdered: Soul Suspect (2014), in which they discuss the variety of story and gameplay functions that ghosts serve. The authors end with final notes about ghost hunting applications for smartphones.

Overall, this work is a fantastic introduction to the American ghost story. Despite there being no argumentative throughline of their work (including no conclusion to the book), Brewster and Weinstock still make convincing arguments within each chapter about the importance of ghosts and ghost stories in American literature and history. This text would benefit a syllabus for an undergraduate course. Interested scholars, too, may find some of Brewster and Weinstock’s analysis illuminating, especially the final chapter on digital media.

-22 Sep. 2025