"[24] Xavier Aldana Reyes’ sees the film studies as operating as dual roles (both general and scholarly): they are “companion” books with lots of interviews for “teachers and those fans who may be interested to find out more about their favourite director and two of his most significant films.” Yet Reyes’ finds that Olson's more sophisticated reading and “guidance in his questions manages to also steer discussions towards more revealing aspects regarding the perceived psychology and motivations of well-loved characters.”[25] Michael Dirda argues that his film books gained notability by their uncommonly large size and completist ambitions.
[26] Noted by reviewers for their recurring interest in and depiction of trauma, David Cowen contends that irony, surprise, and reveals are the key feature of the film studies: for instance, “as the interviews in Olson's collection reveal, the makers of The Exorcist did not expect the public to be so affected.”[27] Laurent Vachaud maintains that Olson's books are notable for their re-creation of the psychological tensions that exist on the set and in shooting locations that reflect how masterpieces come with conflict and pain, established by interviews with crew like The Shining’s cameraperson Ray Andrew, who was fired for refusing to work overtime without pay, and then was filmed by the Director's daughter Vivian Kubrick as he walked in away shamed post-dismissal.
Notable for featuring many authors whose stories became films that fought formula (from Camille DeAngelis, Adam Nevill, Sheri Holman, Nick Antosca, Stephen Susco, to Joyce Carol Oates), Lois Tilton of Locus magazine argued Olson's series compilation "rejects the romanticizing, the domestication of the traditional tropes: ... What we have here is very dark stuff ... disturbing ... really creepy.
"[31] Gail Brasie remarked on the wider gender representation of authors listed on the Exotic Gothic series' table of contents, and the equal number of male and female contributors in the final volume, because women “are often underrepresented in [other] anthology collections.”[32] Brasie also claimed that Exotic Gothic series stood out in the first part of the 21st Century because “there is very little of the ‘exotification’ of non-white or non-Western spaces and people; where there is, the characters engaging in this thinking are usually destroyed.”[32] Later, Olson turned to collecting non-original fiction, [33] and curating the entire short-fiction oeuvre of a single author.
[37] The Washington Post concurred with many of the selections this library reference book 21st Century Gothic offered, arguing that it presents “the major works of this genre published in the past dozen years, including Peter Straub's A Dark Matter, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, James Lasdun's The Horned Man, Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.
Olson records and categorizes their sighting of missing persons, doppelgangers, grotesque violence, ghosts, and the sublime, or their imagining of sex, madness, disrupted time, and the uncanny during the War on Terror, and translates it to a language.