David L. Pike has taught in the Department of Literature at American University since 1995. He is the author of Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds; Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800-1945; Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001; Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, neo-Victorianism, subterranea, urban fantasy, global urban culture, and Paris and London. He is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City and of Literature: A World of Writing, and co-general editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature.

• Introduction: The Bunker Fantasy before and after the Bunkered Decades


• Part 1. America 1962: The New Mutants and Where They Lived


• 1: In the Basement: Shelter, Suburbia and the Nuclear Family


• 2: Back to the Cave: Tribalism and Feral Humanity


• 3: The Private Supershelter: Survivalism and Self-Reliance


• 4: We'll All Go Together When We Go: Shelter and Community


• 5: Mountain Deep: Government Supershelters


• Part 2. America 1983: The New Survivalism and Where It Hid


• 6: How to Survive the 80s


• 7: Men's Action Fictions


• 8: Nuclear Realism


• 9: Feminist Bunker Fantasies


• Conclusion: Cold War Space and Culture since the Cold War

A study of the uses in American culture of the image of the post-war fallout shelter in the 1960s and 1980s that offers ways of understanding those decades and speaks directly to contemporary issues around borders, migration, and national, regional, and personal security.