The title of this series comes from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, in which the German Lutheran theologian describes the "numinous" at the heart of religion as an experience preceding any systematic dogma or ethical component-a "feeling," in short, much closer to the sublimity of horror than any sensation popularly (read "dully") conceived as "religious" (love, happiness, well-being). An astounding array of writers have since, whether consciously or not, furthered Otto's observations. Some of them explicitly tie horror fiction to the holy. Scholarly works directly examining this connection include Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets, Douglas Cowan's Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, and Kirk J. Schneider's Horror and the Holy. Georges Bataille is also relevant here, along with the Communion books of Whitley Streiber, and contemporary philosophers like Rene Girard, Jeffrey Kripal, and Erik Davis.

Not surprisingly, consciousness of the interplay between weird fiction/horror and the holy (perhaps more properly thought of as "the numinous") has been most pronounced among fiction writers themselves. Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen consciously inhabited this space. H.P. Lovecraft almost certainly had a sense of it, and contemporary authors like Scott R. Jones, Matt Cardin, and many more have made the strange, sublime borderlands between terror and religiosity a central aspect of their work.

None of this is as surprising or as niche as it might appear-a close reading of religious experiences will readily demonstrate that the divine path is always fraught with terror, and where else but in horror fiction can we find the spirits, miracles, and gods that once dominated human interactions with their (largely unknown and mysterious) environment? That this isn't more obvious to us is a testimony to the fact that we've distanced ourselves from the uncanny strangeness of religious sentiment-perhaps this very distance makes the numinous in horror more urgent now than ever.

Mysterium Tremendum is a quarterly chapbook dedicated to this potent intersection.
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• Literature & FictionLiterary Fiction

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