Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press)

In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured 300 years, a demiurgic consciousness shaped in late antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.