The book starts with a pretty standard horror novel setup. Little kid hiding in the closet, accidentally becomes an audience to his parents who are oblivious to his presence getting it on. Then his sister comes in, hacks mom and dad to death with a cleaver, and hangs herself. In the late 70's this would have been a pretty standard "shocking" prelude to a horror story. The kid gets shipped off to a convent to be raised, and we're told nothing else. Skip to many years later. And this brings up one of the interesting aspects of the novel. It's light enough on cultural detail that it is not pinned to any certain year. We can tell it's the late 20th century by a lack of cell phones, people watching t.v., and the one specific cultural reference in the book that mentions a poster of Mick Jagger. The book was written in 1977 and released in 1978, so one assumes that is the setting, but there is nothing specific pinning it to that time. If, for example, you were making it into a t.v. show, you could set it anywhere from the late 60's to the mid 90's without having to alter any major components.
We pick up the story with Peter Balsam coming to a new town to be a teacher at the Catholic school. Peter was raised at the convent and was going to be a priest, but decided he didn't have the calling. He still works for the Church somehow though, which seems odd since he's a psychologist. On the train into town he meets divorcee Margo. The immediate assumption is that this is the kid from the opening. But then we learn that he has been summoned to teach at the school by a friend he grew up in the convent with, also named Peter. This is one of the areas where the book is frustrating. The reader is obviously supposed to wonder which Peter is the kid, and the fact that they both are named Peter, don't know much about their early childhood, and were raised together in the convent does play into the story. But the story never plays up the aspect of either man possibly being the kid who was traumatized by witnessing the murder/suicide of his entire family. But this isn't really delved into except as a plot device at the very end that is almost inconsequential.
The book takes a while to really get into gear as well. The thing that is supposed to bring us into the horror is an outbreak of suicide among the girls of the school. But initially there is one girl who makes an attempt but fails, Then it pages and pages of Peter just feeling uneasy. He is starting a relationship with Margo, but there never seems to be any real chemistry there. He thinks his old friend (? They never really establish how close the two were, and never demonstrate that they were at all, other Than Peter Balsam's willingness to come across the country when Peter Vernon, the Monsignor, calls him to) has become a fanatic and may be deranged. We are told repeatedly there is something "off" about the town, without ever seeing much evidence. It sets us up for a struggle between Peter Balsam's faith and his scientific mind, but while we're told a couple of times that this is taking place we again never really see any evidence of it. There is a Society that Peter believes is up to nefarious practices, but the only evidence that is unearthed is that they use ritual to enter a form of self-hypnosis in which state they engage in a homosexual orgy.
That is probably the part of the book that has aged the least well. The use of homosexual acts as the evidence that the Monsignor is up to no good. He simply has to be evil, because he lets men suck his cock. Of course in the case of Peter Balsam there are matters of consent that make the sex clearly evil, but the book doesn't delve into consent so much as into how icky it is that Peter had sex with men. And unfortunately while you're reading and waiting for some wild evidence of satan worship or something to come up, this gay orgy is the only thing that really happens. At least until we learn that somehow the old priests in the Society are somehow using chants in old Italian to hypnotize girls into killing themselves. Which brings us to the next issue I had.
John Saul obviously knew nothing about hypnosis, and didn't bother to do any research on it. You cannot hypnotize someone to do anything they do not actually want to do, yet that is exactly what the priests do. What's more, they do it over long distance, with their subjects not even being in the same room. There was a scene where they talked Balsam into hypnotizing his class, but there is no indication that they injected any hypnotic suggestion into the session, and it happens after the first suicide attempt has been made. Because yes, there are more attempts, and the second one is successful. The third one comes soon after, and is stopped in time. By this time the town is beginning to blame Peter Balsam, as he is the new element in the equation. Once a fourth girl is successful, and the third girl tries again and succeeds after having spoken with Balsam, everyone is convinced that he is somehow to blame.
There is a whole reincarnation angle which is played as heavily as anything is in the book, but still is not leaned into much. By the end we're still not sure if Peter Vernon believes the two Peters are reincarnations of priests from the Inquisition, one of whom murdered the other, or if that was just a weird element that he threw in to put Balsam off the track. Similarly the Society that takes up so much of the narrative in the last half of the book ultimately seems to be almost incidental to the story at the end. Because it turns out that Peter Vernon was the kid, and as a result hates all teenage girls and is making them kill themselves. There is one final spectacle of a suicide where the whole town watches a girl running to Peter Balsam as she slits her wrists before getting smashed by a speeding truck. Then we go into the showdown.
And this is where you can see the author trying to subvert the tropes of horror novels of the day (most of which still hold true for horror movies to this day). The woman, Margo, who he has been seeing, rather than sticking by her new man through thick and thin despite all her doubts, decides that she is sick of his shit and exits stage left never to be seen again. Rather than some grand, dark conspiracy with far reaching implications, it turns out the whole thing is down to a priest holding a grudge against his sister and taking it out on any teenage girl he can reach. Rather than a climactic showdown, the priest shows up and explains to Balsam that he is going to pin the whole thing on him, make it look like he committed suicide, and leave the clippings about Vernon's childhood tragedy to make it look like Balsam was the one whose family had died. He stabs Balsam in the chest, so I'm not sure how it was made to, look like suicide and that is never explained. Also never explained is how Vernon learned of his past. He says someone sent him the clippings and he doesn't know who or why, and it's left at that.
So in the end, Balsam is dead, buried in an unmarked grave and even his lover doesn't seem to mourn him. His grave is always being desecrated, especially when the suicides start happening again, at the site of his grave. His bones are exhumed and burned, but this doesn't stop the phenomenon. And presumably this is just how life goes for the people in this town from then on. As you can see there are so many problems with the story in this book that it should be unreadable. But there is one mystery that it pulls of really well. That is the mystery of how such a poorly constructed story is so very readable and how it keeps your interest despite nothing much of note happening for so very much of it. I might almost say I enjoyed the book in spite of it not being very good in many ways.
Comments
Post a Comment