Peter Laws’s The Frighteners: A Journey Through Our Cultural Fascination with the Macabre is the kind of book I was predisposed not to like. There is Laws’s chatty, hands-free-mike, from-the-pulpit style (his writing out of “nah” being his most unwelcome tic). Then there is his “sinister minister” persona—the apparent discontinuity of this ordained Baptist minister from Britain who is also somehow so committed to the macabre that he posts horror-movie reviews on YouTube, speaks at horror conventions, and writes horror fiction with Garth Marenghi-esque titles like Purged and Unleashed, as if no one has ever before read a John Donne sermon. (Okay, maybe a lot of people haven’t lately, but I’m permitted my annoyance.) And above all, there is his pie-in-the-sky optimism.

But The Frighteners is one of a few recent nonfiction works attempting in earnest—and with some success—to get at the heart of horror, a genre that rarely stays very long in the realm of the respectable yet one that has never wanted for a curious audience.