Elsewhere on this website I refer to myself as an “unfluencer.” This quasi-serious attempt at humor does bear a kernel of truth. It’s difficult to get your voice heard on the internet. By the time I began blogging, vlogging had already become a thing and people prefer watching to reading. (I do have a few YouTube videos out there, but they take an awful lot of time to put together and I’m kinda busy trying to write obscure books.) The reason I mention this at all is to make a point. People sometimes wonder why a guy who has a doctorate in religious studies wastes his time with horror. There’s a good reason. People will pay attention when the stakes are low. Is horror important? I think it is, but most people don’t. Genre fiction is easily dismissed as being off in fantasy land, despite the growing number of voices suggesting we should be paying attention to how it influences (unfluences?) religion.
Those who delve in such blue collar things sometimes grow to be taken seriously. I suspect—since I wouldn’t know—that it’s a matter of sticking with it long enough, and producing enough content that people have some standard for comparison. And the interesting thing is, you often notice fascinating features along the way. While working on my next book the other day, I realized a major gap in the study of history of religions. I can’t say what it is here, of course, because someone without a 9-2-5 may scoop me. But the gap is clearly there. And I would never have noticed it if I weren’t spending my time writing about low-stakes monsters.
I’m a blue-collar thinker pretty much through and through. Talking it over with my brother the other day, I realized that despite the years and years of higher education, I was brought up working class and I look at the world through those lenses. When I was actually a professor that began to change, but in retrospect, I think that’s why my students liked what I did in the classroom. I wasn’t some child of privilege handing down tired observations meant to impress other children of privilege. I’m just a peasant trying to figure things out. I can point to no highly educated forebears—neither of my parents finished high school. No, I have been fortunate enough to have clawed my way through three higher degrees only to realize that people only listen if the stakes are low enough. And I’m alright with that since I get to spend the time with my beloved monsters.
