Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme where we randomly select a book from our Goodreads To Be Read list and share it with the world. It’s been hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners, but I’m not sure if that blog is active anymore. Please enjoy this preview of what I want to read in the future!
The Frighteners: Why We Love Monsters, Ghosts, Death & Gore
by Peter Laws
Nonfiction
320 pages
Published March, 2018, by Icon
From Goodreads: The Frighteners follows the quest of Peter Laws, a Baptist minister with a penchant for the macabre, to understand why so many people love things that are spooky, morbid and downright repellent. He meets vampires, hunts werewolves in Hull, talks to a man who has slept on a mortuary slab to help him deal with a diagnosis, and is chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac through a farmhouse full of hanging bodies.
Staring into the darkness of a Transylvanian night, he asks: What is it that makes millions of people seek to be disgusted and freaked out? And, in a world that worships rationality and points an accusing finger at violent video games and gruesome films, can an interest in horror culture actually give us safe ways to confront our mortality? Might it even have power to re-enchant our jaded world?
Grab your crucifixes, pack the silver bullets, and join the Sinister Minister on his romp into our morbid curiosities.
Doesn’t this just sound interesting? Especially during the spookiest season of the year. I’ll need to get to it sooner, rather than later if I want to read it in time for Halloween…
Traveling in Books 
It’s funny, when I read the title I thought it was somehow related to the movie, The Frighteners, a funny “horror” movie starring Michael J Fox and directed by Peter Jackson back in the mid ’90’s. It was a fun watch even if completely unrelated to this book, which also does sound interesting. It’s attacking questions I’ve long had. As a kid I loved vampire movies, but they scared me so bad I’d sometimes look away from the screen and cover my ears, until I just had to look again and hear what was going on. Why did I have to keep looking? What kept drawing me back to these movies?
Ooh, this does sound interesting! I’ll keep an eye out for your review. 🙂
I’ll definitely have to read it soon, then!
I loved The Frighteners movie! I watched it the summer before the first Lord of the Rings film came out, since I was trying to watch all the Peter Jackson films I could get my hands on, which wasn’t much at the time. I saw The Frighteners and Heavenly Creatures, and both were fantastic.
I don’t watch too many scary movies. I don’t know what it is about them, but I usually get tired of them in short order and many of them make me laugh rather than frighten me (Paranormal Activity was one. There was another that scared the bejeezus out of people, and i ended up laughing at, but I can’t remember the title). The Woman in Black and The Babadook were ones that hooked me, but I think a lot of it had to do with the atmosphere. I enjoy certain horror TV shows like Penny Dreadful or The Living and the Dead, but those aren’t full of jump scares. They’re all about the characters dealing with weird happenings.