Inside the Walls of My Own House

Poetry. Film Studies. Drama. "'Dark Shadows made me believe / in a world of paranormal certainty,' and after you read this book, you will too. Tony Trigilio writes a world in which there is no separation between his dailiness and the fictional realm of DARK SHADOWS, the supernatural soap opera he clearly loves, even with its daily rash of continuity errors, bad makeup, flubbed lines, and inherent camp, a show that has possessed him since he first watched it as a child with his mother. This book is haunted—how could it not be? —not only by Barnabas Collins, the doddering vampire who enfolds and catalyzes the show's time-traveling retreat to 1795 New England and back to its present, but also James Earl Ray, the Boston Marathon bombings, and, most intensely, Trigilio's mother, who emerges in this book as a complex figure worthy of the multi–volume poem the poet has undertaken, even if it may well bury him alive." —Nick Twemlow