No Go the Bogeyman1998
scaring, lulling, and making mock
by Marina Warner
No Go the Bogeyman considers the enduring presence and popularity of figures of male terror, establishing their origins in mythology and their current relation to ideas about sexuality and power, youth and age.
Songs, stories, images, and films about frightening monsters have always been invented to allay the very terrors that our sleep of reason conjures up. Warner shows how these images and stories, while they may unfold along different lines - scaring, lulling, or making mock - have the strategic simultaneous purpose of both arousing and controlling the underlying fear.
In analysis of material long overlooked by cultural critics, historians, and even psychologists, Warner revises our understanding of storytelling in our contemporary culture. She asks us to reconsider the unintended...