Is "cult" just a fashionable catchword found in blurbs and on movie posters, or a cultural phenomenon that should be taken seriously?
Can only a devoted group of fans raise a work of art to a cult status?
Is any deliberate attempt to write a cult book/make a cult movie necessarily futile?
Do cult works constitute a specific and independent genre?

The authors of the essays in this volume, European American Studies scholars and their American colleagues, do their best to answer these questions, offering a plurality of views on North American cult fiction and cult films. The contributors searched for cult works among the classics, as well as in the realm of popular culture, discussing both the reception and generic criteria of cult. Among those writers whose cult status is acknowledged and analyzed are James Fenimore Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, Andrew Holleran, Ken Kessey, Cormac McCarthy, and Ezra Pound, while film critics scrutinize the movies of David Cronenberg, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Edgar G. Ulmer. And, like every proper contemporary book on cult, ours contains essays on graphic novels, Star Trek, and, as a special bonus, the unique personal memoir of a true cult freak on the victorious triumph of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on American campuses.

Publikace "Cult fiction" je jakýmsi průvodcem jmény, která buďto předznamenala, anebo přímo vytvářela alternativní, radikální cestu k uznávanému a obecně přijímanému kánonu kultovní literatury, hudby a kultury vůbec: Kathy Ackerová, Richard Brautigan, Douglas Coupland, Tama Janowitzová, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Milan Kundera, Robert M. Pirsig, Boris Vian, ale i Alfred Jarry, Robert Musil, Gustav Meyrink, Vladimir Nabokov, Markýz de Sade, Fjodor Dostojevský, Franz Kafka anebo Samuel Beckett.