**
Early 20th century ghost story writer M. R. James once amusingly derided the use of ellipses, those three little dots that indicate an unfinished thought, and while The Entity has few enough of those, it is a novel positively built on the little buggers. This story -- of a woman suddenly and inexplicably beset not just by an unfriendly spirit but an actual "spectral rapist" -- never quite completes a thought, and that includes the ending. Why? Perhaps because it is based on the real-life paranormal case of a woman named Doris Bither, a case that ended with more questions than answers. Yet that explanation hardly flies when Bither's story is compared to that of Carlotta Moran, the unfortunate heroine of the novel, for De Felitta exercises his artistic license with such abandon that the frequent gaps in motivation and logic come off just as James indicated, as nothing more than taking the easy way out. The author's embellishments, meanwhile, are pure Hollywood (and, in fact, he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 adaptation): the woman becomes beautiful, two love interests are added, and the team of paranormal investigators are able spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on sophisticated laboratories and equipment when the actual investigators seemed to have had to make do with a Polaroid camera. But, of course, none of that is the problem; the problem is that the woman is a contradictory and unsatisfying character, her would-be lover is an adolescent posing as a highly regarded psychiatric intern, and the investigators are simply unbelievable. Interestingly, De Felitta was present during the actual investigation, and claims to have witnessed some of the spectral appearances described in the book.
Early 20th century ghost story writer M. R. James once amusingly derided the use of ellipses, those three little dots that indicate an unfinished thought, and while The Entity has few enough of those, it is a novel positively built on the little buggers. This story -- of a woman suddenly and inexplicably beset not just by an unfriendly spirit but an actual "spectral rapist" -- never quite completes a thought, and that includes the ending. Why? Perhaps because it is based on the real-life paranormal case of a woman named Doris Bither, a case that ended with more questions than answers. Yet that explanation hardly flies when Bither's story is compared to that of Carlotta Moran, the unfortunate heroine of the novel, for De Felitta exercises his artistic license with such abandon that the frequent gaps in motivation and logic come off just as James indicated, as nothing more than taking the easy way out. The author's embellishments, meanwhile, are pure Hollywood (and, in fact, he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 adaptation): the woman becomes beautiful, two love interests are added, and the team of paranormal investigators are able spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on sophisticated laboratories and equipment when the actual investigators seemed to have had to make do with a Polaroid camera. But, of course, none of that is the problem; the problem is that the woman is a contradictory and unsatisfying character, her would-be lover is an adolescent posing as a highly regarded psychiatric intern, and the investigators are simply unbelievable. Interestingly, De Felitta was present during the actual investigation, and claims to have witnessed some of the spectral appearances described in the book.
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