100 books like Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell

One of the most disturbing and terrifying books of all time. I was shocked to find out that the author of this book was a Christian, and that is what led me to read this novel. I had heard about how horrific the film was and, despite my penchant for horror, I avoided both the movie and the book, considering them both demonic.

When I finally read the novel, I realized that this insane story reveals a truth regarding faith: to accept God and the reality of who He is, we must also acknowledge and accept the reality of demons and darkness, and vice versa. 

This book is a skeleton key for understanding the fundamental relationship between religion, horror, and the supernatural. Otto was a German theologian and scholar of religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in this, his most famous book, he set out to interrogate the nature of holiness, understood not primarily as supernatural moral goodness but as the feeling of numinous dread that accompanies the supernatural, and that “first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny, ‘ ‘eerie,’ or ‘weird.’” He explicitly states that it was this emotion in the mind of early humans that gave rise not only to religion but to the cultural traditions of ghost stories and horror tales. If you read only one book on religion and horror, make it this one.

Like most of the other authors on my list Joseph Laycock has written several books that address religion and horror. I picked this one because it is the first of his books that I read and it awakened me to several of his other titles.

Laycock, who is a professor of religion, writes in an engaging way and has a great sense for what is happening in the wider culture, particularly about occult concerns. Vampire books are a guilty pleasure of mine, so reading this author on this subject seems both a natural and a supernatural choice. The book discusses modern vampire societies in a clear-eyed and informative way.

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.

Nelson’s book is a revelation in how it explores the work that both religion and popular culture can do – her readings of Lovecraft’s work are particularly evocative. I’m not on board with the sharp line she draws between high and low culture, but it’s one of those books that’s fascinating even when you disagree with it.

This book opened my eyes to how a scholar of religion could engage with horror films. I sat in my hotel room and started reading it the day I purchased it because I couldn’t wait until I got back home to start it.

Douglas Cowan deftly demonstrates how horror films engage in conversation with religion and he does this in non-technical language. In a culture where religion, or at least organized religion, is in decline, it still has incredible power in pop culture.

Many religious people avoid horror like they would a real monster. Sacred Terror, apart from suggesting a title for my book, shows horror and religion both benefit from the discussion. Cowan has written other good books on the subject as well.

Brandon Grafius is a prolific author in this area and I found this book to be a very good interaction between someone who is a Christian minister and a horror movie fan.

While this isn’t Grafius’ first book on the subject, it is his first to attempt to explain “why”—why would a normal, upstanding citizen watch horror? It helps debunk the idea that only social outcasts or disgruntled individuals watch horror. (Surveys indicate well over half of people in the United States admit to liking horror films.)

This coming out of the horror closet is a personal and very readable account.

A central assertion of the Christian right is that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be again. But this argument, as Green documents in his meticulous study of historical and legal sources, is deeply embedded in Americans’ sense of their national history as exceptional. He examines a series of claims made about critical junctures in the early history of the nation that purportedly support this view--the religious founding of the English colonies, the American Revolution as a religious cause, American government formed to be Christian. His careful examination of the evidence for and against the crucial claims of the Christian nation thesis provides a nuanced history of the religious terrain of early America by studying those who made such assertions and why. Green concludes that these claims developed during the nineteenth century rather than during the nation’s founding. More importantly, they are largely mythic but… show more.

This excellent local history survey enables us to step back to the period immediately before the migration to the Netherlands to see the kind of life the future Pilgrims were leading in their home shires. The East Midlands had long been a home of religious radicalism. Some of the men and women destined to take the historical transatlantic journey grew up listening to Puritan preachers berate the clergy of the established church for not being sufficiently reformed. Under the microscope of Sheils' research, we can see the emergence of ever more extreme separatism and the emergence of groups of impatient, intolerant 'saints' meeting clandestinely and contemplating leaving their homeland in search of the perfect church.

This book, that has an amazing feeling cover, tells an important part of not only American history, but more importantly, women's history. This story is beautifully illustrated using a great color pallet. Follow along on Anne’s journey to the new world and how she changed that world forever!