Religion and Its Monsters

Religion and Its Monsters started this whole conversation.

Timothy Beal successfully transitioned from an author of academic books to an author of trade books, and this one shows how he did it. He selected two unexpectedly compatible subjects and demonstrated that they lurk in the same mental spaces.

I was inspired by this book to allow myself to reclaim my childhood interest in monsters as an adult. If serious scholars wrote about such things, why shouldn’t I read about them?

Unfortunately, Beal never followed up with another book on the topic.

Beal is a contemporary scholar of religion, and this brilliant book is one of my favorite things ever. In essence it’s a book-length application of Otto’s concept of numinous religious dread to a well-considered selection of classic and contemporary horror texts. Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein, Lovecraftian horror, and also classic literature such as Beowulf and Dante’s Inferno, all factor into Beal’s examination of the way the primordial chaos of ancient religious mythology, which perpetually stands behind the scenes as a threat to cosmic order, shines through the eyes and shapes of various monsters and thus makes them… show more.

Reader beware: hic sunt dracones (here, there are dragons). In his excellent book, Beal covers topics that many people will find controversial: the monstrosity of God and Christ, Dracula’s connection with Hebrew Bible, and the rise of monstrous identification. Throughout, Beal traces delicate historical threads to link topics across time that highlight both his understanding of biblical material and knowledge of modern film and literature. Sometimes the monsters that we ignore are the ones that dwell the closest to us….