Abstract
Peter Straub’s fiction is preoccupied with the nature of evil. Both in his use of the Gothic supernatural and in a series of serial-killer narratives, Straub asks questions of the nature of evil and its relationship to concepts of the good. Though Straub does not write from an unambiguously theistic perspective, this chapter argues that his depictions of evil can be situated within the theological tradition of privation theory that understands evil not as an existing ‘thing’ but as ontologically nothing: evil is a subtraction from being or a distortion of a specific good. The chapter concludes by arguing that in Straub’s fiction, evil’s privation requires a response of creative renewal and that storytelling itself is imagined as an act of redemptive grace.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Straub, A Dark Matter (London: Phoenix, 2011), p. 411. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation ADM.
- 2.
Andrew Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (New York and London: Continuum, 2008), p. 41.
- 3.
The psychologist Andrew Silke points out that a tendency to view the capacity for extreme violence as a psychological abnormality is common to representations of terrorism, in which the terrorist is often assumed to be a psychopath incapable of empathy for his or her victims. See Silke, ‘Becoming a Terrorist’, in Andrew Silke (ed.), Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its Consequences (Chichester: Wiley, 2003), pp. 29–53.
- 4.
Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, pp. 5–6.
- 5.
John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, revised edition (London: SCM, 1977), p. 255.
- 6.
Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 99. Knight offers a fuller discussion of the literary implications of privation theory in Chesterton and Evil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 48–54.
- 7.
Sears, Stephen King’s Gothic.
- 8.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 129.
- 9.
Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 101.
- 10.
Peter Straub, Floating Dragon (London: HarperCollins, 1984), pp. 395–6. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation FD.
- 11.
John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, second edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1985), p. 13.
- 12.
Hartman, Saving the Text, p. 129.
- 13.
Peter Straub, The Throat (New York: Anchor, 2010), p. 85. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation TTh.
- 14.
Luke Ferretter, Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 36.
- 15.
John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 17–18.
- 16.
To describe evil as ‘inexplicable’ in this limited sense does not rule out the project of theodicy, that is, the question of how the presence of evil in the world can be consistent with the existence of God. See, for example, Hick, Evil and the God of Love; D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (London: SCM, 2004).
- 17.
G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 154.
- 18.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 54.
- 19.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 54.
- 20.
Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 26–7.
- 21.
Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. 2.
- 22.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 49.
- 23.
Stephen King and Peter Straub, Black House (London: Orion, 2012), p. 45. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation BH.
- 24.
Evans, Augustine on Evil, p. 149.
- 25.
Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. 54.
- 26.
Milbank, Being Reconciled, pp. 16–17.
- 27.
Gary K. Wolfe and Amelia Beamer, ‘Peter Straub and the New Horror’, in Gary K. Wolfe, Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, ebook (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), pp. 127–36 (pp. 128–9).
- 28.
John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. by Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 145.
- 29.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 54.
- 30.
See John 1: 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word [Gk. logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’.
- 31.
Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 18.
- 32.
For a helpful overview of shifts in thinking about religious language in modernity and postmodernity, see Gavin Hyman, A Short History of Atheism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
- 33.
Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2.
- 34.
Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
- 35.
Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16.
- 36.
Loughlin, Telling God’s Story, p. 179.
- 37.
Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, ‘Introduction’, in Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds.), Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 1–21 (p. 4).
- 38.
For a fuller critical discussion of deconstructionist accounts of language and their relationship to theology, see Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Against deconstructionist views of language as signifying absence, Cunningham argues for a view of language as a site of contest between presence and absence.
- 39.
Peter Straub, lost boy lost girl (New York: Ballantine, 2003), p. 289. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation lblg.
- 40.
Peter Straub, In the Night Room (New York: Ballantine, 2006), pp. 260, 268. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation ItNR.
- 41.
Loughlin, Telling God’s Story, p. 237.
- 42.
John D. Caputo, On Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 15.
- 43.
Arthur Bradley, ‘“Until Death Tramples It to Fragments”: Percy Bysshe Shelley after Postmodern Theology’, in Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (eds.), Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 191–206 (p. 203).
- 44.
Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. ix.
Bibliography
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———. 2003. Lost Boy Lost Girl. New York: Ballantine.
———. 2010. The Throat. New York: Anchor.
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Marsden, S. (2018). Much Ado About Nothing: Peter Straub and Privation. In: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96571-0_4
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