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A cultural history of the strange comfort monsters once offered America and why they lost their hold.
In the ’60s and ’70s, something was stirring in the cobwebbed tombs of the American imagination as creature features became an integral part of pop culture, with headlining monsters appearing on newsstand comics, magazines, cereal boxes, toys, and children's books. For many, this garish world of monstrous pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery, strangeness, and anxiety they were feeling inside but had no name for. Rather than making us more afraid, monsters gave shape to the abstract fears that consumed us, about sex, war, and race, and personified our collective sense of being untethered from mystery and enchantment.
Framing the cultural narrative with the personal, Creature Comforts weaves a compelling account of why monsters surfaced when they did in the popular imagination, as America shifted away from the childlike dream of an Aquarian Age. Peter Bebergal traces how classic movie monsters gave way to new terrors: chainsaw killers, shambling mall zombies, and horrors that felt less mythic and far more real. He reminds us that monsters once helped us navigate the darkness and reflects on why we may never feel their enchantment again.
"Monsters are always among us, both onscreen and off. Thankfully we have Peter Bebergal's Creature Comforts to light our way during dark times, a monstrous quasi-memoir that uncovers the healing additives of horror, making the case that the midnight creature feature is the best antianxiety medication around."—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside
"A lifetime of love for and fascination with the macabre myths that shamble through our collective imaginations. Bebergal's Creature Comforts is a trove of fact and experience, reflecting on the enduring presence of monsters in our cultural consciousness."—Ram V, author of The Swamp Thing and The Many Deaths of Laila Starr
“Fascinating and poignant. Bebergal is a beautifully sensitive archaeologist of our twentieth-century pop nightmares.”—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams
"A fascinating account of a transformational period in monster kid culture and culture in the wider sense—sharp, insightful, humorous, and often surprisingly moving."—Kim Newman, author of Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
"Part memoir and part film history, Creature Comforts poignantly captures the pop culture paradigm shift of the late 1960s into the ’70s from a child’s point of view—when the classic movie monsters crept out of their nighttime supernatural realm to mutate into serial killers hiding in plain sight on daytime TV. As Peter Bebergal wisely tells us, monsters like children struggle to find their place in a strange world whose rules they don’t quite understand."—Victoria Nelson, author of Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
"Peter Bebergal's Creature Comforts is a brilliant hybrid work where criticism and memoir are as intertwined as the human and the otherworldly are in the monstrous. Reflecting on his own love of iconic American mid-century pop culture monsters, this is a work that parses not just Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but the fears and anxieties—real and imagined—that define so much of American life."—Ed Simon, author of Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain