I cannot wait to share this book with my friends and family. Laura Hall does a fantastic job tying the horror genre to colonization!

The book sets before it an impossible task and almost manages it. The author is not here to describe settler colonialism in horror; they are here to argue that settler colonialism is horror. Not in the obvious sense, but in the sense that horror - horror film - as a genre in North America is itself a manifestation of the popular feelings on the Indigenous.

Does it work? Better than I thought it would. The book considers different horror films and series, and how they work to enforce or struggle through the 'civ/sav' binary, with a particular emphasis on the 'Final Girl' trope and its relation to power and violence in the fears of the majority.

The interpretations are often contradictory. Horror writ large is a genre about the monster and the mixture of fear and desire that exists towards it, including using genre as a means to get subversive or heterodox material into cultural production. Here, the same work can be looked at as demanding the awfulness of North American history as it can be to dismissing it.

The book particularly shines in providing a good critical overview of its subjects, building its own analysis on top of it. However, this leads to the book's major weakness. Not all movies are as good a fit, and at points the book turns Procrustean in treating the Indigenous as the only true Other, of which all other others are a subset. Thus, some of the chapters in the middle in particular get tenuous.

I love a polemic, but to break out this tone patrol badge, late in the book the language walks past aggrieved and into derisive (particularly including goes at sarcasm, which is never a good sell in writing). It is unfortunate because author clearly wants to save the best for last, and the works that they have the most strong feelings about, good and bad. It is fun personality that adds to the weight of the work through most of the book, but there it starts to backfire in it making the argument read weaker in being more defensive.

Still, the utility here is intense, both in its overview of different genre interpretations and in its critical framework.

My thanks to the author, Laura Hall, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Regina Press, for making the ARC available to me.