(Actually, Skal's socio-politics do get problematic, even bizarre. For the most part it's limited to the excessive but harmless Freudian phallocentrism that Eve detected--for the love of David, man, the poses of the Aurora model-kit monsters did not secretly evoke masturbation--but occasionally, as in his out-of-left-field assault on gender-change operations as Frankensteinian affronts to womanhood or his paranoid rant about the Human Immunodeficiency Virus not really being the cause of AIDS (is he taking med school classes with Thabo Mbeki?), the author veers into bona fide crackpot territory. It's as distracting as it is disturbing.)

Am I glad I read the book? Oh, sure. I can't get enough of this kind of stuff, and as I said there's plenty of little diamonds in that great big rough. But the gaping holes in Skal's canon are too wide to be ignored even by the most charitable horror fan. I said before that Skal gave himself too much leeway with the second word of his subtitle; I think that ultimately what killed this beast was the first word. This truly was a cultural history of horror--David J. Skal's. The cultural history of horror has yet to be written.