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So, my Louisiana gothic horror novel, Wolf in the Sanctuary, comes out on 10 June. Since it is a novel dealing with faith, spirituality, religious guilt, and religious trauma, I thought this blog post should be dedicated to talking about some of that. I asked friends who were still practicing Catholics what questions they would ask someone writing a novel like this, and I picked the four most asked questions to answer.
- What first drew you to explore religious themes in your horror writing?Religion is such a powerful force driving people’s lives. Even those who aren’t religious are surrounded by its trappings, its haunts, and its spirit—at least in the US and, from my experience, in Europe as well. So, on a social level, there are the fears associated with taboos and violations; being perceived as an outsider for practicing no faith, a different faith, or even a different version of a particular faith; or of exile and excommunication. And then you add the cosmic horror of massive, invisible beings beyond human comprehension—gods, devils, spirits, etc.–who create, destroy, tempt, judge, and damn mortals for actions that, if the religious stories are literal truth, the mortals being judged didn’t get a say in what the rules were. And for those with firm, unshakable beliefs that their religion is either 100% true or is 100% false, the horror, the terror, the sheer panic of learning the fact that the opposite of their beliefs is true. It breaks people to learn their faith is not true. And it would break someone who does not believe to learn a particular faith—with all of its darkness, monstrosity, and terror—is true.Honestly, on a personal level, there are two places I really find scary when I’m alone: schools and churches. There is just something about being alone in either of these places that evokes a primal fear within me. For a church, perhaps it goes back to the cosmic horror aspect. You are supposed to feel community, acceptance, love, and a divine presence within the walls of a church. So, that feeling of being totally alone of that space of love, hope, and acceptance being nothing but a void space, a space where silence screams… that is the essence of fear for me.
- How has your own relationship with faith or organized religion shaped the terrors you write about?This is a long story, and I won’t bore everyone with the details. I grew up in a religious family. Half of my family is Roman Catholic who still hold to Vatican I. The other half is fundamentalist Southern Baptist and other evangelical denominations. I went to Catholic school for all but my senior year. I was required to attend Bible school and church camp every summer. My parents volunteered me for mission trip after mission trip. My father was a Sunday School teacher. My mother played piano. My uncle was a preacher.But my own relationship to faith slowly frayed when I was a teenager. I lived through the Satanic Panic and saw people go feral as they attacked things like D&D for being “satanic” when it made no sense. As someone who has struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts, hearing people I respected actually tell me that these feelings were either “proof I had no faith” or were “God’s testing of my faith.” And then hearing preaches and priests tell rape survivors that “God would not allow this to happen if you didn’t deserve it” – all of these things started tearing at cloth of faith within me.And then came the terror of realizing I was a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Sermon after sermon, homily after homily, lesson after lesson told me that my existence was an abomination, that I should not be, that God despised me for being what I was. That my existence was something to atone for. I agonized for years about coming out to my parents, and after one of my mother’s friends forced me into a position where I had to come out to them, I was promised love and acceptance… but that slowly changed. My parents cut me off from my family. They told people at weddings and funerals I was “sick and not getting better.” They said my existence declared that their god “made mistakes, which he cannot do.” My own mother called me an abomination to my face. And that hasn’t changed.Beyond that, my faith journey has taken some interesting turns. Going back to the Satanic Panic, one traveling preacher came to town when I was a teenager. He gave a talk on the prevalence of Satanism in the US. Now, I remember nothing about that talk other than a slide in his slideshow depicting the cover of Aleister Crowley’s Magick: In Theory and In Practice and me having the overwhelming belief I needed to read that book. I finally did, and one thing that really stood out to me was where Crowley directed the reader to not believe what he said. He followed that up with a statement that this book contained a record of the practice through which he came to his then current understanding. He directed the reader to follow his practice and judge his conclusions based on their own experiences.And for me, that was huge. A spiritual leader (such as he was) saying that “this isn’t about blind obedience and faith. This is about using the sensory experiences you have in the world and the rational faculties of your brain to reach a conclusion about meaning.” Now, my conclusions didn’t align with his, but that path down a more esoteric faith coupled with Craft has led me to a place where faith is beautiful, powerful, and moving. But my very Christian family would simply label that “heresy.”
- How do you balance respect for sincere belief with the darker, more unsettling elements you’re mining?I don’t go after belief. If a person is sincere in their spiritual beliefs, lives by them, and does not seek to force others to live by them by threat of humiliation, exile, suffering, or death, then I leave them alone.Where people often assume I don’t do that is when they conflate their faith with the religious institution. I will go after the institution for its sins. And we’ve seen in recent decades how the church, both Catholic and Southern Baptist, have long hidden and protected priests and ministers who have sexually assaulted children. We’ve seen how they work to maintain and increase political power, demanding that the laws of this secular nation conform to their particular interpretation of their scriptures. We’ve seen how they take something that should provide hope, community, and a vehicle for positive social change and reduce it to slogans like “thoughts and prayers,” allowing children to be massacred in their classrooms while saying they have “put it in God’s hands,” which then means that they no longer have any obligation to work for the betterment of society. Basically, they forget that faith without deeds is meaningless and choose to place the responsibility of working for the betterment of all onto their invisible cosmic father who does not act in clear, definable ways—if at all.So, in short, faith is beautiful. However, it is the twisting of it into either a bid for political power with the intent to hoard resources like a dragon and to control and dominate the lives of others as one believes they should live (whether or not they want to live that way or even should live that way) or the use of religious behavior to avoid engaging with the problems of the world in a meaningful way, that I seek to call out. And that’s something the gothic has done since the 18th century—read Lewis’s The Monk.
- In Wolf in the Sanctuary, what inspired the specific ritual or rite that unleashes the curse?It really wasn’t a ritual that unleashed the curse. The sin-eater ritual was one of those non-sanctioned (or not officially and publicly sanctioned) rites in the medieval world for those who were deemed too sinful for absolution by traditional means. It was one of those rites people turned to when they felt they had no other hope. But the curse itself wasn’t brought on by a rite. It was brought on by the betrayal of one they chose to be their scapegoat.And the inspiration for that was the old folklore motif of the curse of the dying breath. This motif is the belief that when someone uses their final breath to utter a curse, that curse resonates through the universe and the gods, the nature spirits, the powers and potentates that be take notice. It is a powerful statement where the last living act of a person wronged is to place a curse on those who wronged them. And so, I chose that because so many times those who wrong others in the name of religion or of some belief in the “greater good” choose not to admit their wrongdoing; instead they double down on their actions, making things worse for themselves. A self-fulfilling curse, if you will.
Those are the most asked questions from my Catholic friends. If you have any good-faith questions, feel free to contact me and ask them. As a reminder, Carmilla’s Gambit comes out on 3 June and Wolf in the Sanctuary on 10 June.
-Robin
cursingravenbooks.com 