Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Hot under the Collar

Readers couldn’t get enough books about spooky Catholics. In the wake of The Exorcist, a cry went up from paperback publishers: “Send more priests!” And, lo, did the racks fill with demonic men of the cloth and scary nuns.

For unto us, in 1974, three horror novels were born: The Black Exorcist, The Search for Joseph Tully, and The Sentinel. As discussed, The Black Exorcist is its own wild West Coast jam, while Joseph Tully and The Sentinel are set in isolated apartment houses in desolate New York neighborhoods. Tully became a cult classic, conjuring up gloomy gothic Gotham atmosphere and delivering a still-potent sting. But The Sentinel was a bona fide money train thanks to a moderately successful movie version that featured an all-star cast (John Carradine is Father Halloran! Burgess Meredith is Charles Chazen! Christopher Walken is Detective Rizzo! Jeff Goldblum is Jack! And Ava Gardner is “the Lesbian”!) It also featured a grotty urban hellscape, courtesy of director Michael “Death Wish” Winner, and a famous climax in which the gates of hell spring open and vomit forth a legion of demons played by sideshow freaks, actors with disabilities, and amputees.

Invoking the holy trinity of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Other on its inside cover, The Sentinel tells the story of Alison Parker, a top model in New York City who, like all beautiful women in 1970s paperbacks, is troubled by a dark past.

After flying home to attend daddy’s funeral, Alison returns to New York determined to make a fresh start, move into her own apartment, and forget about sins of the past. She finds a dream pad in an old brownstone that comes complete with antique furniture and creepy neighbors, like lovable old busybody Charles Chazen and his black and white cat Jezebel; the Norwegian lesbians in 2A; and Father Halloran, who sits in his unfurnished apartment on the top floor staring out the window with blind eyes.

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The Guardian featured big action, psychic warfare, and séances gone wrong, but its tired transsexual-panic plot twist left it feeling as flat as a communion wafer. Credit 20

After being shocked by her lesbian neighbors (“Masturbation and lesbianism. Right in front of me!”) Alison takes to fainting randomly. A doctor excavates the dark secret behind her multiple suicide attempts: when Alison was a kid, she walked in on her father having sex…with two women at the same time!!! Young Alison ran away but her father chased her down and tried to strangle her with a crucifix necklace, sending her into a fainting, barfing frenzy that ended only when she kicked him in the nards and renounced the church.

What happens next is that Alison is attacked by the naked ghost of her father, her mind shatters, and her lover confines her to the loony bin like some eighteenth-century country squire chaining up his wife in the attic. After Alison is released, her delicate grasp on sanity slips completely when she confronts the realtor who rented her the apartment.

“Why, Alison,” the realtor says, “no one lives in that building but you and Father Halloran.”

Alison never stood a chance, thanks to a Catholic conspiracy to groom her as Father Halloran’s replacement. The poor guy is ready to retire from guarding the gates of hell, which happen to be conveniently located in this delightful brownstone with period details. The book ends with Alison taking the job and the brownstone being torn down and turned into luxury condos. Which sounds like a cheap punchline until a couple years after the movie, when Konvitz wrote a sequel, The Guardian (1979), set in the same high rise.

Readers were particularly fascinated by the priestly vow of celibacy. Surely, they reasoned, a total denial of sex must mask total sexual perversion. In the Name of the Father, by John Zodrow, wallows in the sweet spot where fascination blurred into fetishization. Peter Stamp is the youngest priest in church history, and he’s haunted by his vows of celibacy, scourging himself in private and exercising constantly to burn off his dangerous sexual energy. Miraculously able to find water in drought-stricken countries, Father Stamp advocates tirelessly for the liberation of oppressed peoples. But wise readers will instantly see through his lies. Turns out, all Stamp’s talk about liberating Central America and the Middle East masks his true agenda: he’s the anti-pope, whose liberal Marxist theology will destroy the Church and bring about the apocalypse.

Fifty million American Catholics provided a ready audience for two-fisted tales of priests taking on Satan (In the Name of the Father), heretical cults (The Night Church), and possessed kids (Shrine). Credit 21

Real-world Vatican infighting always makes for a good plot. Whitley Streiber’s The Night Church depicts a Catholic Church split between a secret cult of Cathars, who are breeding the anti-man to wipe Homo sapiens off the map, and the last surviving vestiges of the Inquisition, who use gruesome blowtorch torture to snuff out the Cathars before their mind-controlled subjects can hump mankind into extinction.

Horror stalwart James Herbert took the Roman Catholic Church to task in Shrine: a mute child performs miracles and, before you know it, the holy fathers are ignoring scary nuns, ghosts, and animated statues of the Virgin Mary and instead falling all over themselves to capture the media spotlight. Here the Church is less concerned with helping the poor than with recruiting new congregants to fill its empty pews. Which means the clergy are caught completely off guard when the little girl turns out to be possessed not by the Holy Spirit but by yet another ghost of yet another murdered English witch. It’s a theological failure that can only be resolved when an army of zombies claw their way out of the grave during a televised healing session and murder pretty much everyone on live TV.

In 1978, after the thirty-three-day reign of Pope John Paul I, the Catholic Church elected its first non-Italian pope in four hundred years. Pope John Paul II became an instant international celebrity, drawing crowds wherever he went. The fascination with priest sex met the adoration of JP2 in Dark Angel, 1982’s overheated hothouse of a novel that tells the story of how the Pope was stalked by a flesh-hungry succubus and how one lone wolf Irish American priest risked everything to slake the she-demon’s insatiable thirst for man flesh and save John Paul’s celibacy.

Joe O’Meara, a tough Irish kid born to Pennsylvania steelworkers, became a college football star known as “the Wolf” before attending seminary in Boston. Now he functions as valet and bodyguard to Cardinal Ricci, the Pope’s right-hand man, who gets humped to death by a succubus in Vatican City. Whoops.

Full of thick-blooming flowers and ripe nightmares wherein hugely pregnant nuns give birth to clawed monsters with the face of Cardinal Ricci, Dark Angel exists in a state of maximum hysteria. As for the succubus, Angela Tansa, she drives Porsches and must have sex every seven days in order to stay alive. Her latest Romeo is a Eurotrash aristocrat who says things like, “I want to fuck that fatness out of you!” as Angela gorges on artichokes and Mexican food…because she’s carrying Cardinal Ricci’s baby!

This is the kind of book in which a priest resists fleshy temptation by jamming a nail through his hand, people vomit their souls into toilets, and succubuses ooze black breast milk. And when Joe discovers that the succubus can be destroyed only if she’s decapitated at the moment of orgasm, you know this book is about to go so far over the top it achieves orbit.

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