Should Christians spurn the cult of the dead which seems to possess millions of people in the weeks leading up to Halloween? If so, should they also spurn anything creepy on All Hallows Eve? Should they boycott Halloween altogether, keeping their eyes focused on the great feast of All Hallows on the following day? These are good questions. Perhaps, however, we might ask another question before we rush to hasty answers. What about the older tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas? What about the haunting of Scrooge by the ghost of Jacob Marley and the visitations of the three holy ghosts of Christmas who bring Scrooge to his festive senses? Presumably, nobody is suggesting that Dickens’ great ghost story should be banned or boycotted during the Christmas season? If so, might we concede that there’s a place for spookiness and perhaps, therefore, a place for creepy stories on Halloween? If so, what sort of spookiness? What sort of creepy stories? To put the matter simply, can there be any connection between the morbid and macabre fascination for horror and the goodness, truth and beauty of Christian literature?

The easiest way to answer this last question is to return to the example of Dickens’ tales of horror and holiness as a way of answering in the affirmative. How then do we discern the holy from the merely horrific?

First and foremost, there must be no ambivalence or ambiguity with respect to which side we should be on. In all healthy horror stories, there’s no sympathy for the devil, nor any affinity with his disciples. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,” St. Paul reminds us, “but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Taking St. Paul as our starting point, we might say that healthy horror stories involve principalities and powers; they include demonic darkness and the devices of the devil; but also, and crucially, they show the defeat of such powers by those who serve the divine forces of goodness, truth and beauty. In healthy and holy horror stories, the Divine defeats the devil.

Having shone the light on the darkness, we can begin to recommend some good ghost stories and some healthy and holy horror stories for our Halloween reading.

There is no better place to start than Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic, in which the eponymous hero fights no fewer than three demonic monsters. Written almost certainly by a Benedictine monk, this classic tale of good versus evil contains some important theological lessons, not least of which is the necessity of God’s supernatural assistance in the fight against the forces of darkness.

No holy Halloween should be divorced from the awareness of the deadly darkness of sin, nor the fact that the devil lurks in the darkness. There is no better way of keeping this in mind than accompanying Dante as he descends into the Inferno. In order to escape the dark wood of sin in which he finds himself at the beginning of the story, Dante needs to confront each of the seven deadly sins by meeting the damned souls in hell who have allowed themselves to be destroyed and overthrown by these sins. There but for the grace of God goes he. And there but for the grace of God go we.

And there but for the grace of God goes Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus tells the story of a scholar’s pact with the devil. Faustus sells his soul to Lucifer in return for magical powers and, assisted by the demon Mephistopheles, is granted his prideful desire for self-empowerment and self-gratification. In the final climactic moments of the play, Faustus grapples with his conscience but, failing to repent in time, is damned.

It’s always good to find time for Marlowe’s great contemporary, William Shakespeare, and Halloween is no exception. Perhaps we might spend time with the Ghost of Hamlet’s father who burns in purgatorial fires because he has been murdered in his sleep with unconfessed sins on his soul; or, if we want to delve deeper and darker into sin than the purgatory of Hamlet, we can plunge into hell with Macbeth. We can watch his heart and mind being poisoned by the three demonic witches, and then we can see how he and Lady Macbeth are possessed by a demonic lust for power.

Having suggested some literary classics, let’s conclude with some contemporary fiction filled with hellish horror mixed with hints of the Holy Ghost. This Thing of Darkness by K.V. Turley and Fiorella de Maria mingles grotesque fact with phantasmagoric fiction, telling the story of Bella Lugosi, the Hollywood actor famous for his playing of Count Dracula, who seems to be possessed by the presence of the role he played. The gothic novels of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf and Wake of Malice, mix the morbid and the macabre with the saintly presence of a Dominican friar, Fr. Gilroy, who is himself a mix of the priest detective and the exorcist.

The final recommendation for Halloween reading is anything by the incomparably quirky Tim Powers, a Catholic writer of the weirdest fiction, whose novel On Stranger Tides inspired The Pirates of the Caribbean film series. His novels, and there are simply too many to mention, interweave demonic possession with page-turning plot-twists, set in the past, the present or the future, and sometimes all three at once. Always, however, there is the presence of grace, combined with the deepest respect for the dignity of the human person, made in the image of God. Tim Powers is at war with the principalities and powers, exercising his great gift of storytelling to exorcise the demons who seek to attack the dignity of men. His work, and these other recommended works, remind us of the truth enunciated by Samwise Gamgee, that greatest of diminutive prophets, that above all shadows rides the sun.

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The featured image is “Tamara and Demon”  (1889) by Konstantin Makovsky, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.