When I began writing Soulless, I knew Bible references alone would not make a frightening story express a Christian worldview. Nor did I want the horror to depend on portraying God, faith, or Scripture as secretly sinister.
I wanted the darkness to be frightening while remaining honest about God’s goodness.
I became a Christian around ten. Faith never required me to deny suffering, evil, or fear. Scripture looks directly at betrayal, oppression, judgment, crucifixion, and death while refusing to let darkness redefine God. Christian fiction can do the same.
Soulless grew from my reading of Revelation 20: after the thousand years, Satan is released and deceives the nations into a final rebellion. From there, the novel imagines an age of peace and restoration whose people choose deception anyway. Adam-1 enters this world: a humanlike being created from a supposedly perfect genetic sequence yet empty where something essential should be.
That premise forced me to consider an unsettling possibility: peace, provision, and righteous rule cannot, by themselves, change a heart that wants autonomy more than truth. People may treat those gifts as proof they no longer need the Giver. That frightens me more than evil committed only from ignorance. The novel taught me three principles for approaching dark material without losing the light that gives it meaning.
First: Identify Where the Horror Actually Lives
Some stories rightly examine abuse committed through religious language or corrupt institutions. My novel asks a different question. Its horror lives in spiritual emptiness, dehumanization, self-deception, and humanity’s willingness to call bondage freedom. God need not be portrayed as cruel for the story to disturb.
A practical test is to finish: “The reader should be frightened because…” If my answer is only “God is powerful” or “judgment exists,” I examine the scene again. God’s judgment may rightly inspire fear in those who oppose Him without making His holiness morally corrupt. In Soulless, the horror lies in humanity receiving peace and righteous rule, resisting the Giver anyway, and facing the consequences of rejected mercy.
Second: Let Mercy Cost Something
Mercy requires neither a happy ending for every character nor the removal of every consequence. It can appear as truth offered before judgment, patience before finality, protection of the vulnerable, or one person refusing to treat another as disposable. Even rejected mercy matters because the offer gives rejection its moral weight.
The cross is the clearest foundation for this principle. God does not dismiss sin as harmless. The Father gives the Son, and Christ bears our sins; divine mercy does not treat justice as disposable. When Christian writers make mercy cost nothing and require no truth, we risk reducing it to sentimentality rather than reflecting the costly mercy we have received.
When revising a dark scene, I ask three questions: Who is still being treated as a person? Where is truth being offered? What does compassion cost the character who practices it? These questions keep the story from confusing bleakness with depth. They distinguish divine patience from indifference and final judgment from arbitrary cruelty. Within a story, showing consequences that follow real choices after warning and patience helps readers perceive both the seriousness of sin and the goodness of mercy.
Third: Carry Theology Through Human Consequences
A character can preach when preaching belongs naturally to that person and moment. The problem comes when a character becomes the author’s mouthpiece because the theme needs explaining. A story carries theology most convincingly when readers also experience it through decisions, relationships, bodily reactions, silence, loyalty, and sacrifice.
In Soulless, spiritual emptiness does not remain an abstract concept. People lose sleep. Children suffer consequences they cannot understand. Families face the temptation to protect their comfort instead of one another. Characters must decide whether telling the truth is worth isolation after the crowd accepts a lie.
During revision, I ask whether readers can recognize the belief being tested through a character’s choices before the narration names it. Theology can affirm that every human being possesses dignity; fiction can make us grieve when that dignity is ignored. Theology can explain that deception destroys; fiction can place us beside someone who recognizes the lie and must decide whether to speak.
This is why horror has a place within Christian fiction. Horror strips away the distance between an idea and its consequences. It asks what remains when appearances become unreliable, when the crowd embraces something false, or when security is offered in exchange for surrendering part of who we are.
Not every Christian reader will enjoy horror, and no one should feel obligated to read a genre that causes genuine distress. Yet Christian fiction becomes smaller than it needs to be when hope exists only in gentle settings or manageable emotions. Some readers already know fear, grief, trauma, and spiritual exhaustion. A story that acknowledges those experiences while refusing to let evil redefine God or goodness can offer a different kind of hope. It can admit that darkness is real without granting darkness the final word.
I wrote Soulless because I believe the soul is worth defending and human choices matter before God. I want readers to leave unsettled but not empty: to recognize that darkness is real without granting it the authority to redefine God, mercy, or the God-given worth of the person standing within it.
