Satan Gets Woke
In 1971 another one-two pop culture punch reshaped the era when a pair of low-budget movies, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, grossed millions at the box office. Blaxploitation was born! Ready to ride the wave was Holloway House, a cheapjack publisher founded by two white Hollywood publicists in 1959. The company radically changed direction after the Watts riots in 1965, when management saw an underserved audience in the ashes and started cranking out mass-market paperbacks for African American readers.
Holloway House was run with all the ethics of Blackbeard the Pirate, and its iconic authors like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines earned pennies while the publishers made millions. The company published twelve magazines, including Players, an African American version of Playboy that was a huge financial success and, for a time, functioned as a soapbox for black liberation. Until the bosses actually read an issue and insisted on removing every article about politics and making the models look as white as possible.
Joseph Nazel was an author, activist, and journalist who edited Players for a year and hated every minute of it. Slugging down Jack Daniels, a pistol in his desk drawer, he jammed out a tornado of pulp fiction in a blaze of fury, all of it published by Holloway House. Capable of producing a book in six weeks, Nazel wrote novelizations of blaxploitation flicks like Black Gestapo and hardboiled pulp like Black Fury. And he never, as far as anyone knew, sent a single submission to another publishing house, remaining weirdly loyal to the people who least valued his talents. In his blaze of pulp production, Nazel had a blaxploitation version of The Exorcist ready to smack the racks nine months after the movie premiered in theaters. Meet The Black Exorcist.
Barbados Sam and his woman, Sheila, are high priest and priestess of a satanic voodoo cult on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Their pitch is simple: “What the hell has that jive white God and jive honkie religion done for them?” But in a cynical twist, the cult is in fact a front for the Mafia, with Barbados Sam and Sheila forcing true believers to assassinate mob targets. Every inch of Sam and Sheila’s scam is fake until they murder a cult traitor (and possible police informant). Sheila’s eyes glow green and she becomes possessed by the real Satan. “It was time to move beyond murder for hire. It was time to slaughter at random,” the Dark Lord enthuses, dreaming of a race war.
Opposing them is righteous soul brother Reverend Roger Lee, assistant pastor of Resurrection Church of Christ, who used to be a pimp working the streets until he found God. Sheila sprouts cloven hooves and tries to seduce Lee; when that fails, she squats to urinate on his Holy Bible and he whips her bare butt with his belt, driving her into the streets. Meanwhile, a young cultist trying to kick his satanic habit tosses his grandma out the third-story window of a hospital.
Nazel lifts gags from The Exorcist, giving them a quick coat of gritty ghetto grime, and there’s plenty of padding as mamas spend five pages wailing for their dead babies. But Nazel was an African American man deeply tied to his community, and so The Black Exorcist has a real feel for L.A. street life. And any book that gives us a climax where the protagonist is stabbed to death in the face as his cult chants “White is the color of death! Black is life and power!” knows how to deliver the goods to its small sector of the literary marketplace.
Holloway House published only two other horror novels: Devil Dolls and The Rootworker. Credit 18
Hot under the Collar
Readers couldn’t get enough books about spooky Catholics. In the wake of The Exorcist, a cry went up from paperback publishers: “Send more priests!” And, lo, did the racks fill with demonic men of the cloth and scary nuns.
For unto us, in 1974, three horror novels were born: The Black Exorcist, The Search for Joseph Tully, and The Sentinel. As discussed, The Black Exorcist is its own wild West Coast jam, while Joseph Tully and The Sentinel are set in isolated apartment houses in desolate New York neighborhoods. Tully became a cult classic, conjuring up gloomy gothic Gotham atmosphere and delivering a still-potent sting. But The Sentinel was a bona fide money train thanks to a moderately successful movie version that featured an all-star cast (John Carradine is Father Halloran! Burgess Meredith is Charles Chazen! Christopher Walken is Detective Rizzo! Jeff Goldblum is Jack! And Ava Gardner is “the Lesbian”!) It also featured a grotty urban hellscape, courtesy of director Michael “Death Wish” Winner, and a famous climax in which the gates of hell spring open and vomit forth a legion of demons played by sideshow freaks, actors with disabilities, and amputees.
Invoking the holy trinity of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Other on its inside cover, The Sentinel tells the story of Alison Parker, a top model in New York City who, like all beautiful women in 1970s paperbacks, is troubled by a dark past.
After flying home to attend daddy’s funeral, Alison returns to New York determined to make a fresh start, move into her own apartment, and forget about sins of the past. She finds a dream pad in an old brownstone that comes complete with antique furniture and creepy neighbors, like lovable old busybody Charles Chazen and his black and white cat Jezebel; the Norwegian lesbians in 2A; and Father Halloran, who sits in his unfurnished apartment on the top floor staring out the window with blind eyes.
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The Guardian featured big action, psychic warfare, and séances gone wrong, but its tired transsexual-panic plot twist left it feeling as flat as a communion wafer. Credit 20
After being shocked by her lesbian neighbors (“Masturbation and lesbianism. Right in front of me!”) Alison takes to fainting randomly. A doctor excavates the dark secret behind her multiple suicide attempts: when Alison was a kid, she walked in on her father having sex…with two women at the same time!!! Young Alison ran away but her father chased her down and tried to strangle her with a crucifix necklace, sending her into a fainting, barfing frenzy that ended only when she kicked him in the nards and renounced the church.
What happens next is that Alison is attacked by the naked ghost of her father, her mind shatters, and her lover confines her to the loony bin like some eighteenth-century country squire chaining up his wife in the attic. After Alison is released, her delicate grasp on sanity slips completely when she confronts the realtor who rented her the apartment.
“Why, Alison,” the realtor says, “no one lives in that building but you and Father Halloran.”
Alison never stood a chance, thanks to a Catholic conspiracy to groom her as Father Halloran’s replacement. The poor guy is ready to retire from guarding the gates of hell, which happen to be conveniently located in this delightful brownstone with period details. The book ends with Alison taking the job and the brownstone being torn down and turned into luxury condos. Which sounds like a cheap punchline until a couple years after the movie, when Konvitz wrote a sequel, The Guardian (1979), set in the same high rise.
Readers were particularly fascinated by the priestly vow of celibacy. Surely, they reasoned, a total denial of sex must mask total sexual perversion. In the Name of the Father, by John Zodrow, wallows in the sweet spot where fascination blurred into fetishization. Peter Stamp is the youngest priest in church history, and he’s haunted by his vows of celibacy, scourging himself in private and exercising constantly to burn off his dangerous sexual energy. Miraculously able to find water in drought-stricken countries, Father Stamp advocates tirelessly for the liberation of oppressed peoples. But wise readers will instantly see through his lies. Turns out, all Stamp’s talk about liberating Central America and the Middle East masks his true agenda: he’s the anti-pope, whose liberal Marxist theology will destroy the Church and bring about the apocalypse.