Douglas Cowan has written several books exploring religion and popular culture from a sociological perspective. Two of these––Sacred Terror (2008) and America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King (2018) explored the connection between horror and the religious imagination. Cowan’s new book builds on this body of scholarship by adding a third element: sex. The result is a challenging book that resists simplistic or reductionistic interpretations of horror texts and instead raises challenging, and sometimes disturbing, questions about the affective relationships between these texts and people who read them.
In order to explain what this book is about, it is necessary to break down the triad of elements that it examines. First, The Forbidden Body does not just explore horror, but “the horror mode.” Cowan borrows literary critic David Hartwell’s definition of the horror mode as “the creation of an atmosphere and emotional environment that sparks a transaction...
University of California Press