Fiends, Freaks, and Fantasy

An Unsettling Reflection of the West's Decadent Soul

For some time now, I have been writing about the Christian humanist use of the grotesque in the literature of C. S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, and J. R. R. Tolkien. I have argued that Lewis’s fiends, O’Connor’s freaks, and Tolkien’s fantastical monsters have more transcendent significance than merely entertaining their audiences with horror or disturbing…