Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams situates the life and fiction of the Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Aren Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams's seven novels of supernatural fantasy. From this specific analysis, he develops more broadly applicable approaches to the serious expression of religious experience in fiction. Roukema shows that esoteric knowledge has frequently been blurred into fiction because of its inherent narrativity and adaptability, particularly by authors already attracted to the syncretism, multivalence and lived fantasy of the modern occult experience.

For too long, critiques of religious thought have been delivered exclusively in clinical scientific terms, intentionally stripped of emotion by the nature of analysis. The trouble with the approach is that to argue only by science or reason is to implicitly concede to religions that their positions hold superior poetry or emotion, which is untrue. Having provided a comprehensive intellectual treatment of religious thought and its ample failures in his first book on the subject (What Are You Without God?), Christopher Krzeminski offers this collection of prose poetry to give sound intellectual critiques of religious systems while simultaneously mimicking the emotional withdrawal process of an emerging atheist through the arrangement of the selections. Leaving religious thought is a transforming maturation exercise for both one's intellect and emotions, and I Am demonstrates that there is great music and poetry to be found in that struggle.