Duke University Press, 232 pages, trade paperback, $21.95

Annalee Newitz takes horror seriously. Her new book, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, searches out the subversive anti-capitalist meanings hidden among the flesh-eating corpses, thrill-kill murderers, terrorized teenagers, and rebellious robots populating this particular corner of our culture.

When the standard plots, characters, and scare tactics are analyzed in terms of capitalist economics and ideology, some common themes emerge. Sometimes the stories are fundamentally conservative, sometimes revolutionary — but either way, the fear we experience from the fiction originates in our real social anxieties.

Newitz sums up her thesis like this: “we find serial killers whose murders are reenactments of the conditions under which they must labor, and zombies who cannot rest because colonialism has consigned them to a horrifying halfway point between life and death. Mad doctors experiment on themselves to escape the mental alienation of professional jobs, and cyborgs struggle to deprogram their corporate-controlled minds. The economic subtexts of these monster stories, no matter how distorted and unconscious, reminds us that the specter that haunts our mass culture is capitalism” (pp. 182-3).

It is not really (or at least, not only) psycho killers, cannibal corpses, and aspiring Frankensteins that we fear. It is our soul-deadening careers, the legacy of racism, financial ruin, our increasing dependence on technology, and the sense that we are constantly being lied to and manipulated. Horror, in the narrow sense, reflects a more general alienation.

Newitz should be congratulated for managing to make these (let’s face it) silly stories seem important and, at the same time, make highbrow cultural theory seem accessible, without ever overdoing it or falling into formulaic reductionism. It is not every writer who could mention Jean Baudrillard and Wes Craven in the same sentence and not come off sounding pretentious. (Ironically, Newitz chides Craven for “reading too much Jean Baudrillard” when working on the Scream trilogy.)

My main complaint about this book is that there isn’t more of it. For a study of “American Pop Culture,” there is very little here about television, for example — only six TV shows are even mentioned in passing, and neither “The Twilight Zone” nor “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” are among them. Likewise, there’s no substantive discussion of comics; even the book’s portrayal of Dr. Octopus as Mad Scientist takes its cues from the Spiderman movies, not the original Stan Lee comics. More surprising, perhaps, is the omission of subgenres that would seem to lend themselves easily to Newitz’s thesis. For instance, though she spends an entire chapter analyzing the socioeconomic situation of upwardly mobile serial killers, she gives no attention at all to their country kin — those homicidal hillbillies who (in the cinematic imagination of movies like Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) inhabit desolate areas that have been socially and economically neglected.

Of course, this criticism is itself a kind of praise. It speaks well of Newitz’s writing that I want the argument extended to include other texts, other subgenres, and other media. And the fact that I can imagine how her analysis might apply elsewhere surely says something about the clarity of her explanations and the force of her argument. For by the end of the book, I did feel that I had a more full understanding of the horror genre — which is not as trivial (or as easy) a feat as it might seem. Newitz helps us look beyond the fake blood and spooky music to ask what really scares us, to examine the ways the culture industry uses our fears to turn a buck, and to consider why we keep coming back for more.

Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press, 2006).