Know Jack #489 Six of One…

I was once told that I am not a horror writer (Amazon disagrees). The reason for that assessment was that I wrote too many happy endings. That has some validity. I have been ignored as a Christian writer because I write things about things that are scary and evil. That too is a valid or at least a reasonable criticism. It would be a lie to pretend that pleasing readers doesn’t occupy a corner of my mind. However, I would be deeply dismayed if I were writing to please everyone.

I don’t write both because I’m confused. On the contrary, I write in those genres because they spring from the same well. I’m not the well. For me to claim to be the well would be a tacit confession that my writing is shallow. I simply draw from the well—the well of the supernatural.

Horror and devotion each require an encounter with the supernatural, or if you prefer, the spiritual. In my life, I have encountered the demonic and the divine. Either can be frightening. That is never truer than when a person believes the supernatural does not and cannot exist, only to run headlong into an encounter with it.

That encounter is the stuff of good fiction. The stakes are immeasurably higher than in any other conflict people face. C.S. Lewis once said that while a person can be good for goodness’ sake, they are not evil for evil’s sake. Evil people, he said, pursue good things in evil ways. That is, they rob, they lie, they cheat to get what they want. They may want money, fame, or political office, but none of those things is evil in and of itself.

If I have written them correctly, my characters, like their creator, are ordinary people. It is in their nature to do incredibly good things or go horribly wrong. They sometimes lose battles against evil, whether that evil be physical or spiritual. At times, they go after good things in evil ways, and other times, they steadfastly cling to the good when it hurts them.

Here, I must justify my happy endings. Good and evil are present in this world as objective truths, but they are not equal. I have an abiding confidence rooted in personal experience that tells me dualism, deism, and universalism are the lies of losers. All that is good and true cannot be defeated.

While I love the song, The Impossible Dream, I don’t believe in the existence of the unbeatable foe. I find Freddy, Jason, and their like who terrorize people with their indestructibility through episode after episode boring. The gimmicks used to keep those characters active are beyond the stretch of the most elastic thinking. It’s strange how people who watch those franchises say that Christian faith is beyond reason. But that’s for another post altogether.

Moon and Mann have different readers only as a matter of outward perception. You see, we really do judge a book by its cover.