The Gothic vision prophecies a world deranged and apocalyptic where humanity’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature becomes malevolent and lawless.

When nature appears seismic the human desire for control becomes obsessive. The powerful temptation arises to project humanity’s divided self onto the essential silence of Nature.

The extreme gothic sensibility springs from the central paradox that the loving paternal God and His Son Jesus are nonetheless wilful tyrants – "good" is inextricably linked to the capacity to punish; one may wish to believe oneself free but in fact all human activity is determined, from the perspective of the deity, long before one's birth. Such assaults upon individual autonomy and identity characterize the gothic sensibility. The chilling gothic narrative traces a developing psychosis in the guise of religious piety. In true gothic fashion, the man of piety suffers a physical transformation commensurate with his spiritual condition. (The gothic-grotesque sensibility is graphically expressed by artists such a Hieronymus Bosch and Goya who insist upon the "physicality" of such spiritual transformations)

"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allen Poe demonstrates with consummate skill the presentation of a psychotuc voice with such mounting plausibility that the reader almost comes to identify with his unmotivated and apparently unprovoked acts of insane violence against his affectionate black cat Pluto and eventually his own wife. "The Black Cat" explores the interiority of a burgeoning, blossoming evil, and a congenital evil. The narrator, addicted to degrees of escalating acts of cruelty, gouges out Pluto’s eye with a pen-knife, and later hangs the mutilated creature: "And then came, as if to my final irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS." In Poe's gothic cosmology, not "I" but the "imp of perverse" rules. With the "logic" of dream retribution, the murdered Pluto reappears in the guise of another one—eyed black cat who haunts the narrator, and after the narrator's murder of his wife, and his walling-up of her corpse in the cellar, brings about the murderer's arrest.

The gothic imagination melds the sacred and the profane in startling and original ways, suggesting a close association with the religious imagination.

Like Poe, H.P. Lovecraft created counter-worlds in which to reveal his diathesis, even if in codified terms. Lovecrafts compulsion is to approach the horror that is a lurid twin of one's self, or that very self seen in an unsuspected mirror. (The unnameable monster/child of the id abandoned in a universe of infinite mystery in which it will always remain an outsider). Lovecraft's cosmology of demonic extraterrestrial beings, "The Great Old Ones", whose intrusion into the human world brings disaster to human beings is interpretable in terms of a mystics vision in which God becomes numerous Cronos-gods intent upon devouring their unacknowledged offspring. Lovecrafts gothic temperament compulsively scrutinizes the inner self or soul. A tragic, pre-historic conjunction of the human and inhuman has contaminated natural life – and nature itself is consequently corrupted.

In the gothic imagination, there is a profound and irrevocable split between humanity and the natural world (as it was envisioned in the romantic sense) a tragic division between what we wish to acknowledge and what is compellingly apparent.

It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it . . .
~~ H.P. Lovecraft [2]

The ultimate level which Sade creates is that of style/aesthetics. The text operates not only as a pornographic narrative/scandalous novel/ subversive philosophy but like a Coleman painting, an instrument of torture which is directed against the reader/viewer. The style is designed to validate the message through the effects it brings about in its audience. Curiosity/fascination draws the viewer in, but this is subsequently replaced by terror and disgust. The style is intended to work as a self-validating pragmatic theory. The painting which addresses evil may itself be an evil thing, and therefore also a valid account of wickedness. An account of the style of terror and its pragmatics of disgust is the essence of any interpretation of Coleman that tries to make sense of his enigmatic enterprise.

"If you look at my paintings", explains Coleman, "they're all saying the same thing: the things I reject are the things that are part of the so-called civilization – a thing invented by people trying to form tribes – who are saying, in effect, if you want to live under this flag you have to deal under these precepts. Why I like Charles Manson is that he had a code: relation to family. Why I like criminals (is) they live by an honor code. In the criminal class, there is a code of honor – which has nothing to do with what society tells you is right or wrong."
~~ Joe Coleman [3]

The Sadeian metaphorical aesthetics of violence flows and is manifested capriciously throughout Coleman's oeuvre.

For Coleman, it is spirituality itself that is at stake The great gap at the heart of modernity, in its embrace of the rational, is in fact a crisis of spirituality. Coleman's may be a tortuous vision but according to him, that's the simple truth. In this respect, Coleman is a medieval soul, engaged in an epic struggle for contact with the indefinable, poised on the cusp of heaven and hell.