Horror: The 100 Best Books (25 page)

"You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shrink from -- the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment -- that's what you make them recognize, embrace! You
are
mankind, or man's condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain. If you withdraw, you'll instantly be replaced. Brute existents, you know, are a dime a dozen. No sentimental trash, then. If man's the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him! Scare him to glory!" -- DAN SIMMONS

Georgetown, Washington. Eleven-year-old Regan MacNeil starts exhibiting bizarre psychological and physiological symptoms. She hears funny noises, develops a skin condition, becomes strangely malicious and foul-mouthed, and appears to have a personality split. After the medical and psychological experts consulted have failed, Regan's mother calls in the church. Father Damien Karros, a doubting priest, investigates and gradually becomes convinced that Regan is an authentic case of possession. He summons Father Lankester Merrin, an experienced exorcist, who recognizes the demon in Regan as Pazuzu, an Assyrian spirit he once bested in a similar case. The two priests administer the sacrament of exorcism and drive Pazuzu out of Regan, but at the cost of their own lives. Along with Ira Levin's
Rosemary's Baby
,
The Exorcist
took the horror genre out of the specialist category and into the bestseller racks. It was famously filmed by William Friedkin in 1973 and spawned a host of imitative "possessed/evil child" books and films. Blatty filmed his sequel novel
Legion
(1983) as
Exorcist III
in 1990, ignoring the previous movie sequel,
Exorcist II: The Heretic
(1977).

***

Mention
The Exorcist
and what comes to most people's minds? The movie, of course: rotating heads and pea-soup vomit. The visual excesses may have been necessary to convey the horrors of demonic possession, but they blunted the moral content of the story, and they have completely obscured the spirituality of the source novel. Over the years it has become fashionable in certain circles to interpret
The Exorcist
as a paradigm of adolescence. (Right. Just as
The Shining
is an impassioned plea for tougher hotel security.) This meretricious view cheapens and trivializes a deeply felt religious novel, strips it completely of its numinous power, and has been kept in vogue by a small pharisaic cadre of writers and critics who dismiss as junk any novel wherein evil has an extrinsic source. Ignore them. Here's the real dope. Ego talking? I don't think so. This novel speaks to me as have few others. I've never met Williams Peter Blatty, but I feel I know him. Like him, I had a Catholic upbringing and a Jesuit education -- four years each at Xavier High School in Manhattan and Georgetown University, the site of the novel. Does that, along with my status as a fallen-away Catholic, leave me particularly vulnerable to the tale Blatty tells? Perhaps. But I prefer to think that it makes me more sensitive to the finer nuances of
The Exorcist
. And there are so many nuances that can easily slip by someone not raised in the Church. I remember my first night with
The Exorcist
. I was a third-year medical student. I hadn't been able to afford the hardcover but I snapped up the paperback the moment it hit the stands. At 2 a.m. I was the only one awake in the apartment. My wife and infant daughter were sound asleep. I had early pediatric rounds in the morning but I couldn't put the damn book down. Until that snake scene. That's when the mother watches her little girl, Regan, glide along the floor on her belly, hissing softly, her tongue flicking in and out as she winds about the room. A chilling scene even if you're Hassidic. But when you've been raised in the Church and have spent endless hours sitting before statues depicting the Blessed Mother crushing the serpent, that timeless symbol of Satan, under her foot, and now you're reading of little Regan's body becoming serpentine and gliding free and unhindered through the house, the effect is devastating. Up to now, the novel has given you a few bumps in the night (clever!) and some strange goings on, all of which could have rational explanations. Up to now. In those of us who share Blatty's past, the snake scene leaves no doubt that something unspeakable has invaded the MacNeil house and usurped the body of an innocent child. Our apartment was suddenly too dark and too chilly to bear alone. I confess I slammed the book closed and hightailed it for bed. In a broader sense,
The Exorcist
, published in 1971, is a fitting book to cap the sixties. We all lost something in the sixties. Sure, we still play the music and at times look back fondly on edited memories of the sunniest of those days, but it was not a kind decade. Some of us lost men we looked up to as leaders, some lost faith in government, faith in the political process, faith in God. Some of us lost our minds. We all lost our innocence. In
The Exorcist
, Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit priest who is also a psychiatrist, is struggling to hang on to his faith. He has already lost much of his faith in Man and, worse yet, feels his faith in God slipping from his grasp.

. . . In the world there was evil. And much of the evil resulted from doubt; from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a reasonable God refuse to end it? Not reveal himself? Not speak?
"Lord, give us a sign . . ."
The raising of Lazarus was dim in the distant past. No one now living had heard his laughter.
Why not a sign?
. . . Ah, my God, let me see You! Let me know!
The yearning consumed him.

This is one of the few areas in the novel in which Blatty is unambiguous. And with good reason. Fr Karras' crisis of faith is crucial to the novel. He is yearning to know God, to find an answer to the evil in the world around him. Then comes the poor, stricken child, Regan MacNeil. Her doctors are baffled. All her tests are negative, so they offer lame ideas about hysteria. The child
believes
she is possessed, therefore she
acts
possessed. Maybe an exorcism will reverse the autosuggestion that is making a hell on earth out of her life and her mother's. And so finally Damien Karras comes up against something that goes beyond rational experience. Fr Merrin, an old priest who has performed the rite of exorcism before, is called out of retirement. The demon knows Merrin. They have met before. It tells the priest, "This time you will lose." The exorcism occupies only the last forty pages of the novel, but it draws together all the threads that have been woven through the story thus far. Within the crucible of the rite, a crescendo of horror, Damien's faith in Man is restored by Fr Merrin's simple, unwavering courage. And his faith in God? When Fr Merrin's heart gives out and he dies at the foot of the bed, Karras challenges the demon:

"You're very good with children! . . . Little girls! . . . Come on, loser! Try
me
! Leave the girl and take me!"

We aren't shown what happens next. We are shifted downstairs to the point of view of Regan's mother, who hears the final shouts and the shattering glass. But as Karras lies dying on the stone steps below the bedroom window, we are permitted to look into his eyes, which seem "to glow with elation". That final scene is one of the many ambiguities that make this novel endlessly fascinating, fit for multiple readings. Other ambiguities? Well, to whom does the title refer? Merrin or Karras? Merrin has performed exorcism in the past, but it is Karras who succeeds here. Also, we are told that the possessed is never the target of the demon, but rather those around the afflicted one. Who is the real target here? Merrin or Karras? As for that ambiguous climax: I believe I know what Karras is feeling as he's dying. His intent in taunting the demon to "take me" was perhaps not totally altruistic. If he could
know
, if he could experience first hand the hideous purity of supernatural evil, then surely he could once again believe in the Ultimate Good. Before he went through the window, he had that experience. Thus the elation in his eyes. Damien Karras has finally resolved his crisis of faith, finally found his answer. The rest of us go on searching. -- F. PAUL WILSON

In the 1980s, the world is choking on its own excrement. Austin Train, a scientist who has spoken out on matters ecological, has been forced by the repressive US government to go underground, and "Trainees" are either committing acts of terrorism in his name or living on would-be self-sufficient communes. A mysteriously poisoned shipment of food sent as an aid package to an African nation causes an outbreak of homicidal psychosis and much home-grown controversy. Colorado, where many of the novel's large cast of characters live, is racked by avalanches, earthquakes, pollution, disease, anarchy, mutant worms and other perils directly related to man's abuse of his environment. America slides closer to martial law as resistance to the murder of the planet grows. The last in a rough trilogy of dystopian visions -- the others are
Stand on Zanzibar
(1968) and
The Jagged Orbit
(1969) --
The Sheep Look Up
is one of the most frightening, plausible and angry of the many science fictional forecasts of a hellish future.

***

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed. But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread. -- Milton:
Lycidas

For those you love -- for
all
you love -- I ask you to picture this.
Above: a sky of pale and lifeless blue. No clouds. No birds. No motion.
Below: a scorched and lifeless plane that stretches on forever. Sand baked to slats, flat brown and brittle. No motion. No hope of motion.
No hope.
All that's left of the Earth.
In the foreground, he stands: a dead man, all but naked, his body transparent, the slats bleeding through. He holds in his hand a sun-bleached skull. The skull of a sheep, in grinning profile: black socket staring, the joke long gone. Some flowers, too: the green stems bowed, red petals withered. So much for beauty.
The dead man has no face. A gas mask, only. Robotic. Horrific. The gaping holes where the eyes should be are neatly bisected by the flat horizon, where lifeless earth meets lifeless sky on the far side of that lifeless apparition . . .
I've just described the cover of the Del Ray paperback edition of
The Sheep Look Up
, John Brunner's ultimate nightmare vision. It is without question the most horrifying novel that I have ever read. I'd like to tell you why. Let's face it. Here at the sputtering tail-end of the 20th century, we've got a lot to be frightened about. On top of the same ol' primordial dreads that we dragged up out of the slime with us -- fear of death, and disease, and disfigurement; uncertainty as to where we stand, from moment to moment, on the food chain; fear for the fate of the soul/spark/self when the bag of meat gives up its ghost -- on
top
of all that, the plugged-in contemporary
Homo sapiens
now has the Big Picture to contend with. And a pretty goddam scary picture it is, boys and girls (as if you didn't know). The word has come in from McLuhan's global sanitarium, and it ain't entirely encouraging.
Particularly
for those of us who grew up on systems theory, the Whole Earth catalogues, and an integrative world-view that sees all things as connected to everything else: viewed in that light, it looks like hard times a-comin' for the bright blue ball of spinning mud on which we live. It is precisely that kind of holistic overview that Brunner brings to bear, with excruciating focus, in
The Sheep Look Up
. As in
Stand on Zanzibar
, the novel that netted him the Hugo award, the main character is not so much an individual human as
the world itself
, viewed from a thousand individual human perspectives. Many of those perspectives are predictably uninspiring: you've got your bureaucratic dullards and corporate greedheads, your booming bigots and shrill subversives, your hell-bent nihilists and quavering faithful festooning the ever-increasing ranks of bleating do-what-you're tolders. You've even got a character named Prexy who, I swear to God, is a crystal-clear crystal-ball vision of Ronald Reagan's presidency, written some eight years earlier (and you thought this wasn't a horror novel!). But a surprising, even
alarming
number of the characters are compassionate, wilful, wise, intelligent and (
heavens!
) even noble in their vision. In the end, none of that matters. Each one, like the earth, is utterly doomed. And therein lies the ultimate horror at the heart of
The Sheep Look Up
. It's the feeling of utter powerlessness that Brunner conjures up: the feeling that, once we've let it go too far, nothing we do in retrospect will make a goddam bit of difference. Take, for example, Austin Train: the ostensible hero of the story. He's a brilliant man who's taken the time to articulate the extent of our predicament: the poisoned water, the poisoned air, the poison we feed to our cattle and crops which, in turn, are fed back into us; the implements our governments have developed for chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare; in short, the anatomical fine points of the machines dragging us towards annihilation. A major
faux pas
, it would seem. Train's just desserts? He's driven underground, hunted by the government that has dubbed him traitor and by the movement that has sprung up around his name. Because, yes indeed, the Trainites are here: a million strong, and madder than hell. Their motto is, STOP! YOU"RE KILLING ME!; and they spend their time running around, sabotaging factories, destroying cars, and basically getting their last bitter eco-licks in before the machine can grind them all into burger. Swell plan. Too bad it's too late. In Brunner's book, it's all over but the screaming, and his people are caught up in the last turns of the wheel. Those last turns are meticulously, painfully detailed; for all of the novel's vast staggering scope, each individual tragedy is treated with heart-shredding intimacy. And this is where Brunner's SF epic steps neatly into the horror domain, despite the absence of supernatural Good vs. Evil fisticuffs: in the extent to which we fear for and care about the people. Indeed, this is where the novel's impact goes well beyond most genre fare. Because
The Sheep Look Up
doesn't give us an out. The good guys are as guilty as the bad guys in the end, for sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, Monday morning quarterbacking us over the brink. No Dread Shape from Beyond the Pale to blame it on; no benevolent bearded Father On High to swoop in with an eleventh-hour reprieve. Solly, Cholly. The hot, the cold, and the lukewarm alike have to suck on the Big One before this baby's through. In
The Sheep Look Up
, we are the monsters, replete with our cowardice, greed, and stultifying dirth of vision. We, and the machines that we built in our own image. Just like real life. Nice story, huh? Allow me to take the gloves off for a moment and just say it: this book fucking pisses me off and scares me half to death. As well it should. Brunner's fear and rage and pain are amply displayed and enormously contagious, overshadowed only by his brilliant grasp of the minutiae comprising his macro-analysis. Here at the tail-end of the 20th century, we're close enough to taste a Better Tomorrow. We could feed, clothe, shelter and educate the world. We could move out into space. We could activate all that dormant grey matter, enjoy quantum leaps in human awareness and potential. We could awaken as a species and shuffle off this goddam veil of tears without having to ditch the mortal coil with which it has seemed inseparable. (We might even learn how to get along with our relatives, although that's pushing it a bit. What the hell. It's worth a try.) But to paraphrase David F. Friedman, king of the exploitation film, "We're sitting here with the goose that lays the golden eggs, and instead of just patting it every night we've done everything but strangle it and run our hands up its ass to try to grab another egg." If we're really too stupid to survive as a species, I just hope somebody thinks to carve that on our global tombstone. Along with a copy of
The Sheep Look Up
. It's a cautionary tale. We could use a good cautionary tale right now. The only thing between us and the tar pits is the kind of dangerous knowledge that Brunner has so painstakingly provided here. If this book has been allowed to go out of print, the people responsible should be lined up and shot. If not, go get a copy. Read it. Weep. And then tell me it's not a horror novel. -- JOHN SKIPP