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"Before The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there was The Case Against Satan." This is from the blurb on the back of Penguin's 2015 edition of Russell's first novel. It is, for once, an excellent selling point. It's about a Catholic priest, newly assigned to a small-town parish, who discovers that the teenage daughter of a widower may be possessed -- by Satan himself. The evidence for possession is compelling, yet Gregory is a modern priest with contemporary ideas on psychiatry, so for him the case against is equally persuasive. At first. Other than its leap directly to Lucifer, the book has little in common with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby; on the other hand, if one didn't know better (and, frankly, one doesn't), one would be tempted to say that William Peter Blatty was quite familiar with this book when he wrote his own story of possession, The Exorcist. The parallels are extensive and fascinating, including the scenes of the exorcism itself. That said, while the two books have much in common, they are very different works. To be clear, this is no Exorcist, but horror fans of the latter should be delighted by this earlier book on the same theme, which is just as serious if not as deep and really almost as explicit -- Russell doesn't pull his punches.
"Before The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there was The Case Against Satan." This is from the blurb on the back of Penguin's 2015 edition of Russell's first novel. It is, for once, an excellent selling point. It's about a Catholic priest, newly assigned to a small-town parish, who discovers that the teenage daughter of a widower may be possessed -- by Satan himself. The evidence for possession is compelling, yet Gregory is a modern priest with contemporary ideas on psychiatry, so for him the case against is equally persuasive. At first. Other than its leap directly to Lucifer, the book has little in common with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby; on the other hand, if one didn't know better (and, frankly, one doesn't), one would be tempted to say that William Peter Blatty was quite familiar with this book when he wrote his own story of possession, The Exorcist. The parallels are extensive and fascinating, including the scenes of the exorcism itself. That said, while the two books have much in common, they are very different works. To be clear, this is no Exorcist, but horror fans of the latter should be delighted by this earlier book on the same theme, which is just as serious if not as deep and really almost as explicit -- Russell doesn't pull his punches.
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