Behind the Horror Renaissance

“Hell is empty,” declares Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “and all the devils are here.” To imagine that evil actors will receive no eternal punishment is blasphemy, perhaps, yet it does often seem that life on earth is punishment enough. This is a suggestion made by A Prisoner’s Cinema, Justin Lee’s debut collection of religiously inflected horror stories. Lee’s deeply disturbing tales blend the short-form surrealism, popularized by writers like Aimee Bender and Donald Barthelme, with the American Gothic tradition of Poe, Lovecraft, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. The stories are violent, powerful, and original in their melding of horrific content, subtle formal devices and Christian imagery.