San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute library’s Writer’s Lunch series recently hosted a discussion perfect for the season: Writing Suspense, Fear, and Spookiness. In the wide-ranging discussion
Participants mentioned some notable books related to the season, one of which was Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s. It’s about the cultural hysteria of nearly 40 years ago, when many pop culture media were believed to be promulgating satanic notions. The twenty essays it contains illustrate how easily and how far off the beam we got. (Remember the flaps about Dungeons & Dragons?)
My only excuse for missing this cultural trend entirely is that my daughter was born in 1981, and I was otherwise occupied. For that reason, I was surprised when I encountered it in literature—in an excellent book by National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon, titled Ill Will. Crazy as satanic messaging may seem. it’s not so very different than thinking a cannibalistic pedophilia ring is operating in the lower regions of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. In that suggestible mindset were the seeds of QAnon.
In Ill Will, a man convicted of murdering four family members—parents of his adoptive brother and two cousins—is exonerated thirty years later by DNA evidence. His trial “came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults.” He proclaimed his innocence, yet, despite the lack of physical evidence, “the jury believed the outlandish accusations.” When he’s released, some serious familial reckoning is due.
As fantasy, science fiction, and horror author H.P. Lovecraft wrote, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Satanism, hauntings, werewolves. As long as you believe living-and-breathing people are behind a phenomenon, even if you don’t know for sure who it is, the mystery at least seems knowable. The moment different forces could be at work, well . . . No surprise, Lovecraft was greatly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, who launched so many literary forms in his short life.
Further Reading
There’s a nice long Wikipedia essay about the Satanic Panic that is sure to stoke the fires of authors’ imaginations.
“What Horror Can Teach Us” by Kelsey Allagood
Clay McLeod Chapman’s WHISPER DOWN THE LANE is an excellent take on the Satanic Panic of the 80’s. Told in two time periods, hehandles both that era and it’s aftermath in a suspenseful, page-turner.
I’ll look for it. How did I miss the Satanic Panic?
http://chrisryanwrites.blog/2022/10/09/satanic-panic-novel-feels-timely-in-our-divisive-times/
Thanks! Sounds so interesting.
Yeah, I do remember the Dungeons and Dragons craze. It passed me by as well. I also remember the exaggerated outcries about “Satanists” and cults. We had one minister who had his congregation convinced that a Satanic cult was operating in the area. He insisted I arrest this mentally unbalanced guy whom the minister claimed had written “666” on the chalkboard. When I tried to explain the guy was a mental patient, the minister’s reply was, “We call that sin,” and it was the work of “the Satanists.” He was actually using this ruse to cover up his own marital indiscretions. He called one night claiming someone had broken into his house. When we were called to his residence on a domestic dispute, he immediately accused some of the officers as being members of “the cult.” The biggest irony occurred when his estranged wife was shopping at a department store in a mall when a bullet pierced the window and struck a display next to her. The minister was the immediate suspect, but it later turned out that some knucklehead had fired his rifle in the air and the trajectory of the round sent it in a looping arc to hit the window. Eventually, the minister’s cult claims were exposed as being just as fictional as Dungeons and Dragons and his wife took him to the cleaners in their divorce case.
ha!You have to wonder about the people who are obsessed with sin. Personally, I rarely think about it.