Roguery is more alluring than respectability. Once the Victorian middle classes had defined normality as thrift, prudence, patience, chastity, meekness, self-discipline and industriousness, the devil was clearly going to have all the best tunes. In such a situation, aberration is plainly the option to go for. Hence the postmodern obsession with vampires and Gothic horrors, the perverse and peripheral, which has become as much an orthodoxy as thrift and chastity once were. Few readers of Paradise Lost prefer Milton’s God, who speaks like a constipated civil servant, to his smoulderingly defiant Satan.

Terry Eagleton, How to Read Literature (2013)