Halloween is lower than per week away! Lately it’s mostly about pumpkins and candy and navigating the steep and narrow path between “great costume, Bill!” and “could I see you in my office, Bill?” But the vacation has deep roots within the Catholic tradition and plenty of pre-Christian cultures. Two necessary Catholic feasts—All Saints and All Souls—in addition to quite a few agricultural festivals around the globe have links to what can seem to be a really secular holiday.
Within the worlds of literature and media, Halloween can be related to horror. A number of years ago on Halloween, we asked America editors and contributors to recommend their favorite tales of terror. The outcomes included some literary classics in addition to some unexpected gems.
Richard Doerflinger on Dean Koontz: “For a long time a non secular vision has suffused Koontz’s work, making him the most well-liked explicitly Catholic novelist on the earth.”
Without query, my very own prolonged experience with literary terror was Stephen King’s IT, since made right into a (great) television miniseries and two (mediocre) movies. And two of King’s other novels made the America list. But IT is big and baggy, clocking in at over 1,100 pages, and for long stretches just isn’t a horror novel in any respect, but an prolonged coming-of-age tale. You’re not reading it over one terrified night, although you’re also not going near a sink in the dead of night for a lot of moons. For the true “fright night” experience, I needed to go along with Dean Koontz’s Midnight.
A part of the phobia of Koontz’s fast-paced visit to the town of Moonlight Cove is that each character who becomes a monster seems perfectly benign: a parish priest eating his breakfast, two loving parents, a by-the-books sheriff. But there was also something about how Koontz described the gait of the half-human ghouls of Midnight that made me afraid of the beach at night for years: “splashing through the sting of the foam-laced sea, loping on all fours, the dimensions of a person but actually not a person, for no man might be so fleet and graceful within the posture of a dog.”
I wasn’t the one contributor to select Dean Koontz: Richard M. Doerflinger picked What The Night Knows, warning it’s “not for the faint of heart.” Doerflinger knows his way around Koontz’s oeuvre, having written a fascinating profile of the creator for America in 2018. He noted that Koontz, who was raised Catholic and returned to the church as an adult after years away, is as much a non secular author as anything. “For a long time a non secular vision has suffused Koontz’s work, making him the most well-liked explicitly Catholic novelist on the earth,” he wrote. That’s an understatement: Koontz has sold almost 500,000,000 novels.
Robert Sullivan on Flannery O’Connor: “Piety, certainty and an unexamined life often propel a protagonist toward a form of damnation on earth. That scares me greater than zombies do.”
But why would any religious creator “promote the reality in regards to the world through tales of horror and violence”? Doerflinger noted that one in all Koontz’s favorite authors is Flannery O’Connor, who “sought to ‘make belief believable’ in an increasingly secular world by placing characters in situations that disrupt their lives (and shock the reader) to the core.”
O’Connor was the selection of one other America contributor for scariest tale: Senior editor Robert David Sullivan selected her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” “Extreme gore makes me need to put a book down, however it also dissipates from my mind pretty quickly,” Sullivan writes, whereas O’Connor’s fiction relies less on blood than on dread: “Piety, certainty and an unexamined life often propel a protagonist toward a form of damnation on earth. That scares me greater than zombies do.”
Two America editors picked Edgar Allen Poe; each are Jesuits, a non secular order for whom Poe had a certain affinity; in accordance with legend, Poe—who lived near Fordham University’s Bronx campus and was friends with Edward Doucet, S.J., who later became Fordham’s president—enjoyed the corporate of Jesuits because they were “highly cultivated gentlemen and students, they smoked and so they drank and so they played cards, and so they never said a word about religion.” Probably apocryphal (I’ve never seen a source), but because the Italians say, se non è vero, è ben trovato—“Even when it’s not true, it needs to be.”
America’s poetry editor, Joe Hoover, S.J., picked Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” less a tale of suspense than of sheer malice, and one imitated countless times on movie and tv screens. America editor in chief Matt Malone, S.J., picked Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The macabre account of a disembodied heart that won’t stop beating (or is it the creator’s own heart pounding in his chest?) caused a young Malone some terrors on the age of 12: “I feel of Poe every time I’m lying in bed and aware of my heartbeat. Second, since then, I’ve never been capable of sleep comfortably in a room with an unlocked door.”
Edgar Allan Poe had other interests besides the occult and the terrifying, as Franklin Freeman detailed in Americain his 2021 review of John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night. Poe, by Tresch’s account, was more a scientific author than a teller of dark tales. He paid close attention to scientific developments throughout his life, and frequently reviewed scientific books and periodicals. He even wrote a college textbook, The Conchologist’s First Book, that became a best-seller.
Many scientists also credit Poe with coming up with an early version of the “Big Bang Theory” on the creation of the universe. “After his wife Virginia died, Poe, within the autumn of 1847, wrote his last major work: Eureka: A Prose Poem, also called An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe,” Freeman writes. “Here, Poe proposed his version of the Big Bang and the pantheistic concept that spirit and matter are one.” It was Poe’s most cherished piece of writing: He told a relative that “I haven’t any desire to live since I actually have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.”
Did that prolonged immersion into the world of science over the course of his life paradoxically make Poe so good at telling tales of the supernatural and the terrifying? Tresch concluded that Poe had “sharpened the piercing light of reason and deepened the darkness in its wake.”
Pleased Halloween! Sleep tight.
Matt Malone: “I feel of Poe every time I’m lying in bed and aware of my heartbeat. Second, since then, I’ve never been capable of sleep comfortably in a room with an unlocked door.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Naming,” by Christine Higgins. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each latest and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this can give us a likelihood to offer you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
Theophilus Lewis brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of America
William Lynch, the best American Jesuit you’ve probably never heard of
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Parish priest, sociologist, novelist: The various imaginations of Father Andrew Greeley
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (up to now)
Joan Didion: A chronicler of recent life’s horrors and consolations
Pleased reading!
James T. Keane