Mike Duran’s “Christian Horror”

Christian publishing is uncomfortable with certain fiction genres, what’s generally called “speculative” but includes science fiction, paranormal, and horror. And yet some of the most successful speculative writers, like Stephen King, acknowledge the presence of Biblical imagery throughout many of their works.

For a number of years, Mike Duran, author of a number of Christian horror story collections and novels, has written about Christian publisher’s reluctance to embrace anything in speculative fiction. Publishers know their audiences, however, and is to the audiences that Duran now turns his attention. Christian Horror: On the Compatibility of a Biblical Worldview and the Horror Genre makes a solid case why Christian readers’ attitudes toward the horror genre is misguided and possibly dangerous.

Duran has written an apologetic for the horror genre in Christian fiction, and it’s an impressive piece of work. And he lays claim for horror some of the most famous works in Western literature.

“Many have suggested,” he writes, “that the epic poem Beowulf is one of the earliest horror stories ever written. Possibly the oldest surviving long form in Old English, Beowulf is often cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. Though the story is in essence a pagan myth, most believe it was originally written down by a Christian monk who incorporated Christian elements into the text.”

He doesn’t stop with Beowulf. He also makes a convincing case for Christian elements being incorporated into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,  H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a work in which there is nothing subtle about Christian influence. And then there is the Bible itself, filled with any number of horrific stories.

Mike Duran

Duran examines religious themes in horror and horror themes in religion; how the evangelical culture has in general responded to the horror genre; what he terms “toward an apologetic” for Christian horror; and the main objections Christians voice against horror and similar genres.

I don’t ready much in the horror genre, but I’ve read books by Duran, Mike Dellosso, and T.L. Hines, among others, and I have found the quality of the writing and stories to be at least equivalent to if not considerably better than much of what’s published in mainstream Christian fiction.

And Duran is right: it doesn’t always have to be an Amish romance.

Related:

My reviews of Duran’s Subterranea and The Resurrection.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: J.R.R. Tolkien and “Beowulf”

Like most Americans of a certain age, I first met Beowulf in an English class in high school. I know exactly where I met him – in a classroom on the second floor of the school, in a textbook entitled England in Literature. It was an all-boys high school, so the story of Beowulf, Grendel and Grendl’s mother held our attention more than more works – we couldn’t resist lots of blood and gore, ogres eating knights for snacks, and arms getting whacked off?

I ran across Beowulf again in college, in an English literature class my sophomore year. Being a mixed-gender class and something more serious than high school students thinking of graduation, we focused on the epic poem itself, its structure and narrative, its history and the various literary theories about it. (Am I something of a cretin to say the blood and gore approach was more engaging?)

In the 1980s, I was reading John Gardner’s fiction, and discovered his short novel Grendl, telling the Beowulf story from Grendl’s point-of-view.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Healing the Heart: “The Heart Aroused,” Part 3

There is a scene in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf where the hero emerges from the swampy lake with the head of Grendl’s mother. His own sword being found useless, he first fights with his bare hands, and then discovers a sword in her lair, “an ancient heirloom from the days of the giants.” With this sword he slays the monster and cuts off her head and the head from Grendl’s corpse. But then he sees that the sword has been dissolved by her blood, leaving only the hilt.

David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America, says this dissolved sword signifies two things.

First, that “as the enemy that has frightened us melts away, so does the requisite need for the weapon of attack.” It’s as if the weapon can be used once, and then it’s no longer needed; other battles will have to be fought with other weapons.

And second, that “we can never ultimately show to others exactly how we slew the monster.” We can tell the story, we can create elaborate accounts (like Beowulf) to try to describe what happened, but the battle with our individual monsters can really only be fought by ourselves. This may be the underlying reason by Beowulf fights Grendl and his mother by himself, while other warriors wait nearby (of course, it could be, too, that they were cowards.)

And then there’s the scene at the end, where the aged Beowulf fights one more battle, his last, with a dragon. He succeeds, and kills the beast, but he’s mortally wounded. This time, one young warrior, named Wiglaf, stands with him, while the others hide in the woods.

I find a strange kind of resonance with the scenes in the poem.

For some time, I’ve been regularly talking with a friend about an array of human issues – dealing with anger, how much we are shaped by our parents, how you recognize and break out of patterns of behavior – in short, how to heal your heart. After a considerable period of regular conversations, he told me that I was guarding my heart, that the defenses were significant, and that I needed to find a way to tear the defenses down and become more vulnerable.

To use literary terms, he was suggesting that I had to plunge into that lake and battle with Grendl and possibly Grendl’s mother. No one could tell me exactly how to do this; no one could arm me with the weapons that would be successful. Or perhaps it’s that dragon, and there is no guarantee of success or of escaping with some mortal or even temporal wound.

I think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knows what he faces; he knows what he is about to plunge into and what is going to happen. His friends can’t even stay awake to pray with him, and before the night is over they will have all abandoned him.

Even when the hotheaded Peter raises his sword and strikes the servant, Jesus does something remarkable – he heals the servant’s ear. It is his last miracle before he dies, and he exhibits a tender vulnerability.

Is that the kind of vulnerability that is being asked of me? Is this what is needed to break down the guarded defenses and heal my heart, this tenderness, this vulnerability in the midst of upheaval, betrayal and certain death?

I suspect I know the answer.  

We’re discussing A Heart Aroused at TweetSpeak Poetry. The links went live yesterday, and I likely went overboard a bit by having three posts on what’s covered in the two chapters being discussed this week. I’ve had the book since it was published in 1994, read it and reread it, and referred to it numerous times in the succeeding 18 years. Among a handful of books I can name, it’s become a part of who I am.

This post is also submitted to Bonnie Gray's blog carnival at Faith Barista, where the prompt is "a heart-healing moment."

Related:

A Kind of Madness: The Heart Aroused, Part 1.

“Beowulf: A Management Guide – “The Heart Aroused,” Part 2.

"Beowulf:" The Management Guide – "The Heart Aroused," Part 2

For more than 40 years, I have had a relationship with Beowulf.

As a high school senior, our English textbook included two passages from the famous Anglo-Saxon poem – Beowulf’s fight with the monster Grendl and the death of Beowulf after the battle with the dragon at the end of the poem. In college, I took two semesters of English literature, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature (big fat textbook) included a bit more of the poem, but not much.

Then in 1989, author John Gardner published Grendl, telling the monster’s side of the story. I had been reading a lot of John Gardner’s fiction, and of course had to read Grendl as well. Five years later, I was reading David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, and found Beowulf again in the second chapter. Six years after that, I was in a bookstore in New Orleans and saw a new translation of the poem by Nobel laureate and poet Seamus Heaney. I bought and read it.

In his introduction to his translation, Heaney, points out one more connection for me with the poem. The scholar who performed a kind of rescue of Beowulf from several decades of something amounting to literary deconstruction, and gave it its rightful place as a work of art, was none other than J.R.R. Tolkien.

At TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is hosting a discussion of Whyte’s The Heart Aroused, and tomorrow will be covering chapters 1 and 2, which includes Beowulf. Whyte subtitles the chapter “Power and Vulnerability in the Workplace,” and draws a number of management lessons from the story of the poem:

·         To achieve something important in the workplace, you sometimes have to go to those “dark regions” of the human soul, where you not only find creativity but also your fears and phobias.

·         For the things that truly matter, the outcome of the battle is usually in doubt. Victory and success are not foregone conclusions. And the price of success involves a real cost.

·         Sometimes what you think are problems (represented by Grendl) turn out to be only symptoms of larger problems (represented by Grendl’s mother).

·         And most people don’t have the heart for the battle. Many times you will be alone.

I reread the Heaney translation of Beowulf this past weekend. It is an easy translation to read, even with all the Angle-Saxon names. What surprised me was that the accounts of the fights between Beowulf and Grendl and Beowulf and Grendl’s mother are actually rather short. In fact, most of the poem is “back story” – the history of the Geats and the Danes, the family connections and rivalries, and old battle stories. A poet and a singer have their parts, and there is a considerable amount of boasting by the main characters, which is rather jarring to contemporary sensibilities. But this is all important to the story, or to the story in the way it was told in 8^th or 9^th  centuries (some argue for later) when the poem was first composed.

I would add another “management lesson” to the list developed by White, another lesson of the poem: : we spend far more time worrying and fretting about our fears than what it required to confront them and deal with them.

For me, one of the most moving parts of the entire work is the speech by Hrothgar, king of Denmark, when he warns Beowulf of the perils of power:

O flower of warriors, beware of that trap.

Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,

eternal rewards. Don not give way to pride.

For a brief time while your strength is in bloom

but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow

illness or the sword to lay you low,

or a sudden fire or surge of water

or jabbing blade or javelin from the air

or repellant age. Your piercing eye

will dim and darken; and death will arrive,

dear warrior, to sweep you away.

Focus on what matters, Horthgar says; focus on the eternal things, the things that matter to God. That is what has lasting value.

We’re discussing A Heart Aroused at TweetSpeak Poetry. The prompt for the discussion can be found here, and the links will officially live on Wednesday at TweetSpeak. I will have a third and final post on these two chapters on Thursday.

Related:

A Kind of Madness: The Heart Aroused, Part 1.

Some resources for the study of Beowulf from Greene Hamlet.

The entry for Beowulf at Wikipedia.