Introduction

Holymen and Monsters is a collection of concept work from a darker
world within, where things go bump all night long.
     Our fascination with being frightened seems to be nearly universal,
and ignores boundaries and categories suggested by education, culture,
income, occupation, age, and even taste. Monsters have occupied the human
psyche since our earliest records, and the most effective and memorable
monsters are those which persistently remind us of ourselves. We want
to be shown our darker nature.
     I've always been drawn to literature, movies, and images which explore the regions of our collective mentality just below the comfort and sanity of societal order. The best of these creative minds use a variety of approaches to reach those depths (heights), from bringing the primitive forward into our structured lives, to plunging us into barely imaginable places and time, to challenging our sense of what's comfortable, normal, or right-thinking. The worst of them get mired in the grotesque or prurient, resulting in artless or misogynist slasher-flicks that confuse disgust with horror -- the two feelings come from (and appeal to) very different parts of our minds. Early in his career even Shakespeare tested the limits of gore-tolerance with Titus Andronicus, and in doing so created a play
with a fraction of the real power of his other work.
     While superficial horror like Tarentino (for all his substantial film-craft) and Edgar Poe is primarily about its author, sophisticated horror (not oxymoronic, as proven by Shakespeare, Ralph Ellison, and others) seeks to reveal something to us about ourselves, or seeks to create an allegory for larger, more profound purposes. Mary Shelley told the plot of a scientist gone wacko, but what she really accomplished was to explain the spiritual disconnect that the "new" science was fostering in her society -- God had botched the job, was ignoring His creature's appeals, and His creation was growing confused, disillusioned and rebellious. The aging mother in W.W. Jacob's The Monkey's Paw creates no fewer than three horrors in a brilliant lesson on the consquences of greed -- her son's predictable mischance, the devestating revelation contained in a dividend check, and then the grisly near-encounter at the story's close. Movies like Jaws and Alien rattle our smugness at the top of the nutrition-chain, and something in us remembers a time when we were not at the top. No one with real imagination can listen to Hamlet's ghost-father's hints about Hell, to which he must return within the hour, without remembering some dread from his own experience.
And Macbeth's descent into psychological chaos elegantly conjures the
memory all of us have (eventually) of some utterly irretrievable sin.

My real goal is never merely to depict what is horrific, but rather to tap into the deeper, shared discomfort within us all, the semiconscious awareness that things-go-bump even when the lights are on. Youth, love, affluence, religious fervor, or fierce self-distraction may nearly convince us it's not there, but no one escapes completely. Our need for such artwork and literature comes from our need for reassurance that others have also sensed it -- that someone else
hears the bump but likewise can't explain what's causing it.