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.

The Contradiction of Absolutes

They are allowed to wander through the city, the largest city in the world. They’re struck by the opulence; the wealth; the buildings devoted to religion, government and commerce. The display of so much of everything makes their own beginnings and roots exceedingly humble in comparison. It’s all designed to impress, and it does. It’s designed to remind the viewer of power and might, and it does.

And as if to punch the message home, they see treasured items from their own temple hundreds of miles away displayed with all of the other treasure taken from conquered nations. They see the wealth of many religions, and many nations, on view to press home the point of superiority.

Given that they were taken from their home and families to be trained to serve Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, it would have been easy to assume that their God was dead, conquered, and tossed aside like all the others. Everything in their own experience argued for it, that everything they had believed was a lie.

But that’s not what Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego did. In spite of triumph and power of Babylon displayed before their very own eyes, they choose to remain faithful.

Think of contemporary Western culture as a 21^st century Babylon, except more so.

The wealth, the power, the achievements, the great buildings, the advances in science all sing the same song together and separately. “It’s all relative. It’s all about us. If you want to believe in your little God, fine; just don’t do it in public. Look what we’ve achieved and accomplished without your Christian God. He’s only one of many gods, and who are you to say He’s supreme? There are no absolutes.”

If Daniel and his friends were alive today, you could almost hear the “Been there, done that” response.

I didn’t realize until I read Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism by John Lennox that postmodernism has been around in one form or another for a long time. It was in Babylon; it was in ancient Greece; it was what thinking and cultured Romans embraced even if they had to bow the knee to Caesar (remember Pontius Pilate’s famous question of Jesus: “What is truth?”).

The various philosophies that today we call postmodernism don’t last; they’re largely self-defeating.

“At the heart of postmodernism lies a patent self-contradiction,” Lennox writes. “It expects us to accept, as absolute truth, that there are no absolute truths. We should note this common, fatally flawed characteristic of relativistic thinking: it tries to exclude itself from its own pronouncements. The fact is that no one can live without a concept of absolute truth.”

No one can live without a concept of absolute truth. No one.

Not even postmodernssts.

I’ve been discussing Against the Flow by John Lennox and will continue to do so for the next several weeks on Mondays. It’s a deeply insightful, highly readable book. Lennox is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and a speaker on the interface of science, philosophy and religion. 

Illustration: The Ishtar Gate was one of eight entrances to the city of Babylon during Nebuchadnezzar’s time.