Monster in the Mirror is a spinoff series by Straight White American Jesus – written and created by Lucas Kwong.

This series examines how narratives perfected in novels like Dracula and War of the Worlds, prototyped the conspiratorial blend of fact, fiction, and faith that has become “all the rage” on the contemporary American Right–in more ways than one.

With its millenarian fantasies of “taking America back for God,” U.S. Christian nationalism has received analysis as a spur to extremist violence, a political theology birthed in the Reagan era, and the latest iteration of an American preoccupation with manifest destiny. But the narrative of heroic white Christians rallying against a foreign and sexually ambiguous threat also finds precedent in an unexpected source: the vampires, mummies, and aliens of late Victorian fiction.