Gary Jansen is an executive editor at Loyola Press and the author of Holy Ghosts: Or, How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night, a memoir about his unexpected encounter with the paranormal. He is also the author of Meditations at Midnight: Poetry and Prose, a collection of essays and verses that touch on the mysterious and uncanny side of life through the lens of literature.
In this discussion, Gary shares how the theme of good vs. evil in classic horror stories has shaped his imagination. He also explains why he believes the horror genre is an ideal canvas for authentic Catholic storytelling.
Thomas Salerno: In the anthology Meditations at Midnight, you write about your introduction to the horror genre through the stories and novels of Stephen King. What was it specifically about King’s tales of terror that spoke to you as a teenager? Was it his books that made you want to become a writer?
Gary Jansen: I discovered Stephen King’s books at a young age, during a time when my parents’ marriage was beginning to fall apart. There was a lot of fighting in our home, so I spent many evenings after school and weekends at the library. It was there that I stumbled upon books like Cujo, Christine, Carrie, and Salem’s Lot. Those books really sparked my interest in storytelling. Then a friend of mine had a birthday party, and the main event was going to see the movie Creepshow written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero who created the classic 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead. The mix of the macabre and humor in that movie pushed me over the edge, and I knew I wanted to be a writer. I started creating my own little horror short stories. They were terrible, but they were my first steps toward finding some kind of voice for myself.
There seems to be something special about horror. For many people, part of the enduring popularity of that genre is how it makes the inevitable tragedies and harsh realities of life easier to accept. Was this the case in your own experience?
There was something cathartic about reading horror, especially during that formative time. As I wrote in Meditations at Midnight, there was horror happening in my home, and, strangely, reading Stephen King and writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and Richard Matheson had a calming effect on me. It’s not that I didn’t feel tension or sit on the edge of my seat while reading, but the horror in those stories made things at home seem less overwhelming or dramatic. I grew up surrounded by violence, but reading something like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” made me think, “Well, things aren’t that bad! At least no one is burying someone in a wall!”
We know who the good guys are, we know who the bad guys are—it’s that struggle between light and dark that resonates with me and is such a significant part of our Catholic faith.
Personally, I’ve known some Catholics who shy away from the horror genre in literature and film because they associate it with dangerous occult practices. Obviously, you have a very different perspective. Why do you think that horror is compatible with the Catholic imagination?
I do have a different perspective, though I can understand why some Catholics might shy away from horror. I like to think of myself as an armchair historian of the occult and the supernatural. In fact, I’ve been working on a history of the supernatural across different cultures for years now. That doesn’t mean I’m a practitioner—I’m Catholic through and through. But studying the topic has actually informed my faith because it helps galvanize what I believe. There are plenty of people who study the lives of figures like Attila the Hun or Benito Mussolini without any interest in becoming a conqueror or dictator. But I digress. To answer your question, I think horror is compatible with the Catholic imagination because much, if not all, horror pits the forces of good and evil against each other. The horror I like best has a clear moral structure. We know who the good guys are, we know who the bad guys are—it’s that struggle between light and dark that resonates with me and is such a significant part of our Catholic faith. Granted, horror can be very gory, and it can allude to obscene things, but I avoid that sort of content because, to me, it feels gross. But give me a good old story about someone kicking demon butt and I’m all in!
Would you agree that the horror genre is fertile ground for talented Christian storytellers? And do you have any favorite horror novels written by Catholic authors?
I agree wholeheartedly. I have a lot of non-fiction projects in the pipeline right now, but my agent wants me to take a crack at writing a horror novel series, so we’ve been in talks about that. One thing I love about our discussion is that she said not to shy away from Catholic themes but to lean into them. If I do so, I’ll have to find a common vernacular. The challenge is to not dilute the faith, but at the same time also make it approachable for people in the pews as well as for the non-religious. For the past fifteen years, I’ve been writing books that serve as bridges between the spiritual and material worlds, for people from all walks of life, so writing fiction would be a new way of continuing that work.
As for your second question, The Exorcist, which is truly terrifying, is a classic Catholic novel. Horror and suspense writer Dean Koontz is Catholic. We had a short correspondence many years ago; he was very kind to me when I first started writing. Books like his Watchers, Phantoms, and Intensity are terrific. And let’s not forget Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Although not exactly a tale of the supernatural, this qualifies as a really horrific story. Side note: I had the great privilege of being the editor on Ben Alexander’s collection of lost Flannery O’Connor letters called Good Things Out of Nazareth. Check that out if you’re a fan.
In your book, Holy Ghosts, you recount your own encounter with the uncanny. Why did you want to share this personal ghost story with the world? What lessons can we, as Catholics, take away from your experiences?
It took a year of being convinced by my friends to write Holy Ghosts. Why? Well, I didn’t want people to think I was a quack. But the more I prayed and discerned, the more I became convinced that it was a story worth sharing. During a one-year period following a personal tragedy, a sequence of strange things began happening in our home—classic haunting stuff like electrical problems, unexplained noises, vaporous visions, and having my sleep invaded by wild nightmares such as I never experienced before. Were these things just my imagination, a product of stress and sadness, or was it something else that was going on? My book explores those two questions. The net effect of my experiences convinced me that hauntings can be real. My research revealed that the Church acknowledges this possibility (though it’s not often discussed). St. Augustine writes about strange occurrences in City of God; St. John Bosco had an encounter with the ghost of his dead friend; and even John Hardon’s Catholic Dictionary includes an entry devoted to ghosts.
Anyway, I love ghost stories, and one compelling reason is because if ghosts exist, that’s a certain kind of evidence for the afterlife. Of course, my faith gives me confidence that there is an afterlife, and we don’t need hauntings to convince us. Nevertheless, I wanted to share my story for people who might be on the fence about what they believe. Plus, when I was going through those events that I wrote about in Holy Ghosts, it felt like I was living through a real-life horror story, so I wanted to share both the light and the shadows of the experience. For a couple of years, it had been a terrific bar story recounted to friends over beers. After telling the story so many times, and after being urged by my friends to share it in a book, eventually I realized that sharing my story could do a lot of good.
There is holiness in everything and sometimes we need to be spooked to see that.
I’m glad I did. Over the years, I’ve received emails and letters from people who said they went back to church for the first time in a long time after reading my book. But a word of warning—check out the subtitle. It’s a book that shows the real me, the me that gets mixed up, makes mistakes, is fully human, and sometimes misses the obvious that’s right in front of me.
You’re also a proponent of Ignatian spirituality. How did this mode of Catholic prayer and discernment help you during your paranormal experiences?
At the heart of Ignatian spirituality is the belief in finding God in all things. So when these strange things were happening, as I detail in Holy Ghosts, I kept asking myself, Where can I find God in this? That can be a tough question to answer, especially when your four-year-old is crying because he senses a presence in his room. Ha! Talk about practicing discernment! But seriously, that Ignatian principle of discernment became a driving force in my book.
St. Paul talks about discernment of spirits in his letters, and I’ve often wondered whether he means it figuratively or literally. For me, it’s both. It’s about being able to discern the spirit behind an idea or event, and also about the ability to see or experience spirits, whether they are angels, demons, or ghosts. Since that time, I’ve met a couple of sensitives [people with a particular awareness of the spiritual world] who work with exorcists here in the U.S. I find their work fascinating. Some people out there seem to have a special gift that others don’t. It’s really intriguing.
In the final pages of Holy Ghosts, you write:
The truth is, no one knows the mind of God, and the greatest challenge to faith is realizing that nothing happens without the Almighty’s stamp of approval—good or bad. It is the great mystery of belief and learning to accept that can take a lifetime—and sometimes more than that. But, there is holiness in everything and sometimes we need to be spooked to see that.
Our disenchanted culture is growing more and more ambivalent towards the existence of an unseen world beyond what our senses can perceive and what our scientific instruments can measure. Would you say that encountering the uncanny and the frightening in the pages of a good horror novel has become more relevant than ever?
Yes, I absolutely agree that being shocked by something scary is powerful and relevant, especially if it helps people realize there is more around us than what we think we can experience through our senses. What’s fascinating is how, much like a dark mirror to fairy tales, horror serves this purpose. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien talks about the idea of “recovery”—how fairy tales allow us to see the world with renewed clarity, breaking us out of our mundane existence and revealing deeper truths. Fairy-stories offer us “escape and consolation,” leading to a joyful resolution, often through a miraculous turn of events.
But horror—dark fairy tales, if you will—flips this dynamic. Instead of offering an escape from reality, horror confronts us with our fears and anxieties, often magnified, trapping us within a terrifying world or unknown situation. It becomes a way for us to face the darker aspects of reality, such as death, evil, and suffering. In this dark mirror to the fairy-story, we are temporarily locked in a nightmare instead of being freed from it—yet this can lead to a kind of catharsis, or a realization of the profound spiritual and moral forces at play in the world.
I was too young to remember when The Exorcist movie first came out, but over the years I’ve heard from several prominent Catholics who told me that The Exorcist helped bring them back to the Church. The story has a well-defined moral framework that depicts the battle between good and evil in a way that reminds us of the unseen spiritual world and the power of faith. Similarly, I think the first two Conjuring movies worked well because they were written by Chad and Carey Hayes, both Catholics and brothers (the blood kind, not the religious kind). Both films offer a clear demarcation between good and evil, and there’s a sense of hope and triumph over the sinister supernatural forces at play. There is holiness in facing these dark elements. Much like how Tolkien saw fairy stories as tools for recovery, horror can provide a different kind of recovery, one that forces us to reckon with the reality of evil at the same time as we confront the possibility of overcoming it.
However, when horror strays too far from this moral framework—like in the third Conjuring movie, where the lines between good and evil are blurred—it loses its power to offer catharsis. The focus shifts away from a clear spiritual battle. For me, that’s when it becomes less satisfying, because it undermines the heroism of faith. Call me naive, but I love it when the good guys win.