"Coming of Age in Popular Culture: Teenagers, Adolescence, and the Art of Growing Up covers a breadth of media presentations of the transition from childhood to adulthood from the 1950s to the year 2010. It explores the ways that adolescence is characterized in pop culture by drawing on these representations, shows how powerful media and entertainment are in establishing societal norms, and considers how American society views and values adolescence. Topics addressed include race relations, gender roles, religion, and sexual identity. Young adult readers will come away with a heightened sense of media literacy through the examination of a topic that inherently interests them."

"Bright Darkness explores and celebrates the supernatural horror film, concentrating on its 'golden age', from the earliest Universal talkies to Val Lewton's remarkable B movies produced for RKO in the 1940s, and climaxing with an in-depth examination of Robert Wise's majestic The Haunting made in 1963." "Through detailed analysis of individual films, examining how they came to be made, how they work and how they fit into the context of film history as a whole, Bright Darkness illuminates the developing complexities of themes, styles and techniques. It identifies their influence (often-overlooked) on mainstream cinema, pointing out, for instance, some surprising similarities between movies as respectable as Citizen Kane and Hitchcock's Vertigo, and some of their less celebrated genre antecedents."

"This study sees the 19th century supernatural as a significant context for cinema's first years. The book takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a 'ghostly,' 'spectral' or 'haunted' medium and asks what made such association possible. Examining the history of the projected image and supernatural displays, psychical research and telepathy, spirit photography and X-rays, the skeletons of the danse macabre and the ghostly spaces of the mind, it uncovers many lost and fascinating connections."