Barry Napier | When the Lines Begin to Blur

My book BREAK EVERY CHAIN is, for the most part, a Christian adventure novel. I could simplify things and call it Christian drama, but Christian adventure sounds a little more interesting. It’s a story about faith and how we can find hope in unexpected places when the world is at its darkest.

On the flip side, I have also written horror novels featuring a grave-robbing
witch, a haunted house that gets its power from human blood, and an enormous sea
creature that lays its eggs in the digestive tracts of human beings.

So yeah, I’m a horror guy at heart.

This can confuse some readers and I totally understand that. I get that one
question all of the time: “As a Christ follower, how can you write such horrific
stuff?”

And while the answer is worthy of an essay, it can also be summed up rather
easily. As a Christ follower, my faith is structured around stories within
scripture that are, in and of themselves, quite horrific. The dead coming back
to life, beheadings, crucifixions, demonic possession, people being burned
alive, a global flood, and on and on.

Whether Christians want to admit it or not, the Bible is filled to the brim with
horror.

But I must also admit that I was writing horror long before I gave my life to
Christ (I’m only about 8 years into this thing). But rather than abandon my love
of all things horror, I decided to try to use it to supplement my faith. I
believe that all Christians should use their talents for the betterment of the
world and, when possible, to pass along the message of the gospel—just without
beating people over the head with scripture, guilt, and the hellfire and
brimstone spiel.

So it made me start to wonder what it might look like to have flawed characters
with shaken faith confront things of a dark nature. Where does faith come into
play? Where does our reliance on our own logic end and a curiosity about divine
things begin?

And do you know what I discovered? The balance of these things is just about the
same in both traditional Christian stories as well as horror.

This is one of the reasons it baffles me that Christian horror isn’t more
popular than it is. As another not-so subtle plug for my own work, I’m currently
in the middle of writing a series of books that, while not faith-based enough to
be considered Christian fiction, has an underlying narrative that deals with
faith and how it can be used as a way to better understand the unknown—even when
the unknown consists of poltergeists, mythology, and dark science-fiction tropes.

Look around any writer’s forum and you’ll see many people expressing the opinion that now is one of the best times to be a writer in the history of forever. I agree with this not only because the lines between genres are beginning to blur more and more, but because someone like me can write an uplifting and personal book like BREAK EVERY CHAIN and then turn around to write about vengeful ghosts and lake monsters and it won’t be considered odd (not too odd, anyway).

So the discussion to have is this: as readers, just how blended can genres be
before you feel displaced or fooled by the writer. And writers, to what extend
to you give a certain genre power of your story before bucking tradition and
doing your own thing?

GIVEAWAY

How blended do you like genres for reading? One reader will receive a copy of BREAK EVERY CHAIN