The Author’s Dilemma: Introducing Morality Into the Writing

By Andrea Widburg

One of my cheap thrills is watching the CW show Supernatural. The interaction between brothers Sam and Dean Winchester and their friends, whether angel, demon, witch, or even human, along with imaginative and sometimes incredibly funny plots, has made it an engaging viewing experience.

In addition to the standard horror show and comedy shticks, the long-running show occasionally grapples with moral issues, in no small part because most episodes have the brothers and their friends killing “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Usually the monsters are presented as appropriately evil, but there have been times when these evil monsters have been trying to reform — and the brothers sometimes offed them anyway. Fun stuff, as I said…

‘There’s an Official Washington Exorcist?’

See this excerpt from page 106 in Tales From the Black Chamber by Bill Walsh

By Bill Walsh

When one of her clients turns up dead after buying an apparently unremarkable 16th century breviary, antiquarian book dealer Anne Wilkinson is suddenly swept into a world that she had previously considered imaginary. An esoteric world of occult spells and invocations, of cryptic texts and secret doctrines, a world where necromancers spy through mirrors and armed assassins blow up her office and try to gun her down.

Before she knows it, Anne is recruited by representatives of a secretive government agency established by Calvin Coolidge to fight demons, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural beings—and finds herself caught up in the pursuit of a renegade priest who seeks the power to unleash one of the darkest forces of the past into an unsuspecting present. When the unthinkable occurs, only Anne and a handful of books stand between humanity and the end of the world. Can her intrepid band of scientist-librarians steeped in occult lore and schooled in NSA-level techniques of surveillance, explosives and heavy weaponry prevent the demon known as Abbadon from immanentizing the eschaton? You’ll have to read to the end of this page turning thriller to find out!

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