In his introduction, Brandon Grafius recalls being ten years old and attempting his first cover-to-cover read of the Bible. He found himself not shocked by the dull stretches but by the strange, violent, and uncanny bits never mentioned in Sunday school. That early discovery stayed with him, eventually inspiring his work on a PhD in the Hebrew Bible. In Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture, he argues horror isn’t a modern invention, but rather one of the Bible’s native storytelling modes. The Bible, he notes, is a collection of genres, and the discomfort new readers often feel when approaching scripture comes from viewing it solely as a moral handbook rather than a multifaceted text where terror and transcendence can coexist….
You can read my full review over at Horror DNA.

