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The Case Against Satan by Ray Russel This is the ur-text about American satanic possession, the novella where many of the tropes of the possession genre appear for the first time. Two priests battle the devil, the possessed spews filth, literal and verbal, there's questions of faith and doubt etc. But unlike "The Exorcist", which stays a private family affair until near the end, here there's a greater involvement of the surrounding community in the proceedings, testifying to the cohesiveness and central importance of the Church at that time. Russell's writing is economical and precise, with an ear for the evocative (great chapter titles, by the way), although the dialogue wobbles here and there when the tension reaches a crescendo: "Then I come here and I see my daughter—who you said you were going to help!—out cold, tied up, blood all over her face. And I don’t like it!". As for the exorcism scenes, they're not as sensational as the ones that would come after (althought they must have been shocking enough for 1962), which makes them all the better, because more grounded in reality. Also it's fun comparing the way the devil presents himself as the possession genre progresses in time: here there's an almost naiveté to the way he speaks, still rattling off some faux-Miltonean elevated speech, while in "The Exorcist" he already sounds hip and cynical. This book is all the more interesting for having been published in 1962, a time when the first rumblings of what was being wrought in American academia (via Frankfurt school and the French school) started seeping into the maintream, still only a faint echo that was to erupt violently later in films like "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist". So it reads in retrospect like a heartbreaking story about loss of innocence - not of Susan Garth, the possessed girl, but of American society. One peers as if into an alien planet, reading about Catholicism being respected, a part of the mainstream intellectual discourse and of the fabric of social life, reading intelligent discussions between men of the frock. It's shocking and saddening as it always is when we peer into dead worlds. I think on the social environs that created those decent, intelligent adults, fortified against sordidness (when these days any 11-year old knows things that would make a 46-year old like me blush) and lament what was lost. Innocence, like trust or virginity, once lost is lost forever (trust can be regained, but remains forever chinked). There's a documentary called "Hostage to the Devil", where one of the interviewees relates an exorcism performed by Fr. Malachi Martin on a 4-year old girl. He says that one detail convinced him that the little girl was possessed by a malignant entity: the lascivious, perverse smile on her face, something he couldn't imagine even in the face of a 50-year old ran through mining camp hooker. We're all that little girl now, with no exorcism in sight.

manwblueguitar's tweet photo. The Case Against Satan
by Ray Russel

This is the ur-text about American satanic possession, the novella where many of the tropes of the possession genre appear for the first time. Two priests battle the devil, the possessed spews filth, literal and verbal, there's questions of faith and doubt etc. But unlike "The Exorcist", which stays a private family affair until near the end, here there's a greater involvement of the surrounding community in the proceedings, testifying to the cohesiveness and central importance of the Church at that time.

Russell's writing is economical and precise, with an ear for the evocative (great chapter titles, by the way), although the dialogue wobbles here and there when the tension reaches a crescendo: "Then I come here and I see my daughter—who you said you were going to help!—out cold, tied up, blood all over her face. And I don’t like it!". As for the exorcism scenes, they're not as sensational as the ones that would come after (althought they must have been shocking enough for 1962), which makes them all the better, because more grounded in reality. Also it's fun comparing the way the devil presents himself as the possession genre progresses in time: here there's an almost naiveté to the way he speaks, still rattling off some faux-Miltonean elevated speech, while in "The Exorcist" he already sounds hip and cynical.

This book is all the more interesting for having been published in 1962, a time when the first rumblings of what was being wrought in American academia (via Frankfurt school and the French school) started seeping into the maintream, still only a faint echo that was to erupt violently later in films like "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist". So it reads in retrospect like a heartbreaking story about loss of innocence - not of Susan Garth, the possessed girl, but of American society. One peers as if into an alien planet, reading about Catholicism being respected, a part of the mainstream intellectual discourse and of the fabric of social life, reading intelligent discussions between men of the frock. It's shocking and saddening as it always is when we peer into dead worlds. I think on the social environs that created those decent, intelligent adults, fortified against sordidness (when these days any 11-year old knows things that would make a 46-year old like me blush) and lament what was lost. Innocence, like trust or virginity, once lost is lost forever (trust can be regained, but remains forever chinked).

There's a documentary called "Hostage to the Devil", where one of the interviewees relates an exorcism performed by Fr. Malachi Martin on a 4-year old girl. He says that one detail convinced him that the little girl was possessed by a malignant entity: the lascivious, perverse smile on her face, something he couldn't imagine even in the face of a 50-year old ran through mining camp hooker. We're all that little girl now, with no exorcism in sight.

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