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10. Additionally, and indirectly related to the issue, deflected religious energy also appears in presumptively more virtuous wraps in a variety of civic rituals and mechanisms of accommodation, three of which deserve note: expiation, confessionalism (the need to tell), and the need to pay, in some manner, for the indulgence of voyeurism and the moralistic punch of spectacle.

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21. On this point, see Fiedler, Leslie, “Fantasy as Commodity and Myth,” in Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, ed. Underwood, Tim and Miller, Chuck (New York: Signet, 1986), 52.Google Scholar

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26. Norman Cohn, “Le Diable au Coeur” (review of The Origin of Satan, by Elaine Pagels [New York: Random House, 1996]), New York Review of Books, September 21, 1995, 20.

27. Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” 86.

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34. Ironically, however, the real monster is the audience that is created to watch the monster tracked to his lair and finally—very publically— killed, often in as loathesome a way as possible.

35. Laqueur, Thomas, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gallagher, Catherine and Laqueur, Thomas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 47.Google Scholar

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41. Tropp, Martin, Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture, 1810-1910 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1990), x, 2-3.Google Scholar

42. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,”12.

43. Rubin, Gayle, “Sexual Politics, the New Right, and the Sexual Fringe,” in The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent, ed. Tsang, Daniel (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1981), 113.Google Scholar

44. Washington Blade, April 23, 1993, 18; June 18, 1993, 17; October 15, 1993, 5.

45. Ibid., April 16, 1993, 6; February 19, 1993, 8; March 19, 1993, 6.

46. Ibid., February 19, 1993, 8; March 19, 1993, 6.

47. See Conforti, Joseph A., Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 1, “Inventing the Great Awakening,” 11-35.

48. Washington Blade, March 19, 1993, 25; October 1, 1993, 14; June 18, 1993, 17.

49. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 100. The connection between the articulation of the soul—theology—and the description of the polis—politics—thus makes itself still heard. See, for example, Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, passim; and Wills, Garry, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), passim.Google Scholar

50. Washington Blade, March 19, 1993, 25.

51. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 25. In “Sexual Politics, the New Right, and the Sexual Fringe,” Rubin notes, “The tactics of this Opposition [‘rightwing mobilization’] include a form of sexual red-baiting and a propaganda of exaggeration reminiscent of Hitler. At a time when feminists are called lesbians, when homosexuals are protrayed as child molesters, and when child ‘molesters’ are presented as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.…” (110).

52. Washington Blade, March 19, 1993, 25. A related agenda can be seen in the use to which the fundamentalist right puts therapeutic discourse: a “feel good” therapy of “family values” and the seemingly antinomian words of Jesus are used to support an increasingly centralized, and conservative, political agenda whose code word is “liberty.”

53. King, Stephen, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1982), 368, 58.Google Scholar

54. In Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Simon Watney writes, “Thus, whether or not we live in states or countries where homosexuality is still a criminal offence, a legal gaze invariably surveys our lives, together with the marginally less obtrusive attentions of other agencies of moral regulation, from social workers to the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme. Our lives are constantly the subject of fascinated disapproval, in our homes and on the streets, and are lived out in relation to powerful institutions which we rarely feel brushing past us in the course of everyday life, but nonetheless know are there” (61).

55. Moore, Thomas, Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1990), 110 Google Scholar; see also 114-23.

56. Herron, Don, “Stephen King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic,” in Kingdom of Fear, ed. Underwood, and Miller, , 148.Google Scholar

57. It is also no accident that this limit also usually (though not always) defines the limit of the “human,” which is why the monsters that “stay” with us over time are recognizably human in form however much “over the edge” they have gone. Dracula, the epigone of human hunger, cut adrift from bodily function and human social gravity, existing in the Service of pure desire, will, for this reason, surely outlast the amorphous quality of the “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”