Kristin Janz

Tag: books

  • Is there such a thing as Christian horror?

    I just finished reading the 2nd Edition of Coach’s Midnight Diner, an anthology of “hardboiled horror, crime, and paranormal fiction with a Christian slant”.

    I was mostly reading it because my boyfriend has a story in the anthology. But I’d heard of this anthology before. I remembered being impressed by their submission guidelines. Most Christian magazines and anthologies are way less forgiving of profanity, sex and violence in the stories they publish than, say, the authors of the Bible (to pick a completely random example). So I was heartened to read that it wasn’t really an issue for them; I think the guidelines said something along the lines of “God’s not a pussy, and neither are we.”

    They’ve, um, changed it since to something less crude. (“This is not Guidposts or your Sunday School quarterly.”) But I still approve. The first anthology they put out was subtitled “The Jesus vs. Cthulhu Edition”, further evidence that the editors have a sense of humor.

    The one I read was “The Back From the Dead Edition.” Some of my favorite stories: “Flowers for Shelly”, by Greg Mitchell, was possibly the most memorable story in the anthology, with the best description I’ve ever read of a first person narrator who turns into a mindless zombie during the zombie apocalypse. Jerry Gordon’s “9th Ward” was also memorably creepy, very short, but with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming. I’d be amiss not to mention Donald’s story (for which he used the byline D.S. Crankshaw), “The Office of Second Chances.” I don’t claim to be offering an objective opinion here, but it was one of my favorite stories in the anthology; it’s probably the most humorous story, with its send-ups of action/thriller cliches and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond time. I also liked Maggie Stiefvater’s “The Denial” (about a demon who falls in love with a human woman, and finds some kind of redemption), Daniel G. Keohane’s “Box” (about a victim of child trafficking) and “Small Accidents of God”, by Virginia Hernandez (a teenage girl is unnerved by the menacing shadows she can see hovering around other people, and hopes that “getting the Spirit” will make them go away).

    One thing that the anthology got me thinking about is whether there can even be such a thing as Christian horror. I’m not talking about the window dressing of horror, the zombies and demons and serial killers and such. What I mean is that many critics seem to be arguing that one of the essential features of horror fiction is, at its core, a sense that everything is meaningless. That there’s no underlying purpose to our lives, or to life in general; or if there is, then the mind behind that purpose (if there is such a mind) does not wish us well. Most Christians would agree, I think, that this worldview is antithetical to the essential doctrines of Christianity.

    I realize that Coach’s Midnight Diner doesn’t limit itself to horror fiction. But having read the anthology didn’t do much to convince me that there is such a thing as Christian horror. Most of the best stories were neither horror, nor particularly Christian (I don’t mean that they were anti-Christian, just that Christianity wasn’t relevant to the story). Some were one, but not the other. Even stories with horrific or frightening elements often ended on too much of a redemptive note to seem true to the grim and hopeless horror aesthetic.

    I think one of the reasons I especially liked “Flowers for Shelly”, though, is that it did a better job than any of the other stories at walking the line between Christian faith (the first person narrator who turns into a zombie is a devout Christian, and of course there’s the question of how God could allow a zombie apocalypse to happen to good people), and grim hopelessness (perhaps there’s a purpose, but the zombified protagonist isn’t going to find out what it is). It’s also a bleakly funny story.

    Of course, on the other hand, the Bible itself can be pretty horrific, and not just in window trappings (“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit,” as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us). I’d argue that if you read the entire book, the horrific bits are just local minima (to use a scientific analogy); overall, there’s a purpose. Not necessarily for individual lives, though. People die without ever seeing the redemption that they’d hoped for.

    So I guess I don’t have an answer to my own question. One thing I do know, though; every so often while I’m typing up a blog post, it auto-saves and tells me how many words I’ve written so far; and for an awfully long time while I was writing this post, the word count was 666.

  • Fiction and faith

    At least for the past week, I’ve been able to keep up with my pledge to myself to make more time for reading, and I finally finished a book I’d been at for a long time. Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision and Work, by W. Dale Brown. It was published in 1997, so it’s a little out of date in some ways, especially since some of the interviews took place in the early 90s. All this talk about the first Gulf War, and newspapers still being viable, and hardly anything about the internet.

    The fiction and faith thing is a subject I’ve been interested in for a long time, so the book gave me a lot to think about. The writers interviewed are mostly lit fiction folks, so I had to grit my teeth at a lot of comments about how fantasy fiction can’t be considered art. Most of the writers in the book don’t really write “Christian” fiction (i.e., the stuff you find in Christian bookstores), even if they’re writing about God and faith.

    One of the things I noticed was that, with few exceptions, the writers featured in the book were all quite liberal, politically. I guess since that’s where I find myself, it doesn’t surprise me that writers who wrestle with issues of faith and redemption in their work would have a similar outlook. But I do know Christian writers who aren’t writing standard Christian bookstore fare, who are not any more interested in providing easy but unsatisfying answers than I am, who are more conservative, politically. So I wondered if there was some sort of selection bias, as to the writers who were chosen. Few were genre writers–are genre writers more likely than literary fiction writers to have conservative politics? I don’t know.

    Another thing that I came away with–something I’d already been thinking that was reinforced, really–is how easily and unfortunately we dichotomize. Many of the writers spoke of being too religious for secular readers, but too secular for religious readers. Fiction is religious, or secular. We’re Republicans or Democrats (at least in the country I’m living in). We’re intellectual, or uneducated. And Mississippi-born author Will Campbell, in his interview, talks about how contrary this is to the teaching of the New Testament, and yet how endemic it is in so many churches to do it anyway

    “If you start saying, ‘Brothers and sisters … worldly standards no longer count in our estimate of anything. What this means is there’s no such thing as race … What this means is there’s no such thing as communism and capitalism and North Vietnam and South Vietnam. These are human categories, human standards, and Paul says these are no longer of any account. You don’t consider these things anymore.’ That’s when you start getting into trouble.”

    Campbell’s mostly talking about his involvement in the civil rights movement, but I was really struck by how it applies to so many things, and how far I fall short of the standard God calls us to. I mean, this judging of people (or ideas, or works of art) by the categories you’ve put them into isn’t a problem that the church has exclusively. Literary fiction writers and critics disdain genre fiction. The college-educated look down on those with only a highschool degree (or less). People who eat exclusively natural and organic food look down on those who live off frozen entrees from the chain grocery store. But Christians fall into it, too, me as much as anyone else, and I was kind of moved by the reminder of how wrong-headed it is.

    I’m not advocating the kind of tolerance where no one should express strong opinions about anything, or disagree with anyone else. I just mean that, all too often, we dismiss someone or something because of the category we’ve put them into. And even though I might not like it being done to me, I do it to others. I don’t want people deciding not to read my stories because they’ve found out I’m an evangelical Christian. But I tend to dismiss pretty much all Christian popular fiction (the stuff that Christian publishing houses produce, and that’s sold in Christian bookstores) as insipid and not worth my time. I get irritated if lit majors think my fiction can’t possibly be worth reading because it’s mostly science fiction and fantasy. But I make the same judgment about romance. I don’t want people at church to think I’m a bad person because I would vote for the Democrats if I were a US citizen, and think abortion and gay marriage should be legal. But I’m pretty quick to judge all the Republicans at church because of the policies of their party on the environment, international policy and domestic social issues.

    I’ve heard secular humanists say that this kind of judging based on having categorized someone as “other” is the fault of religion (or maybe even the fault of Christianity, specifically). But I don’t think it is. I think it’s a very human instinct (or perhaps an animal instinct), and I think it’s one of the things that the Christian faith explicitly commands us to put behind us.

    We just don’t do a very good job.