Black Easter

1968 was a dark year. Robert Kennedy was assassinated and the world was still in shock over Martin Luther King's senseless murder. Hippies rioted at the Democrat's convention in Chicago, Charles Manson had begun his murderous rage, Vietnam was a debacle, the Cold War was still on and it seemed the world (humanity calls home) was on a downward spiral headed to bummerland. In 1968, James Blish was writing disposable Star Trek "fan-novels" and was (pretty much) considered the"poor man's" Aurther C. Clark-- when he published the second novel (Black Easter) of his trilogy "After Such Knowledge". "Black Easter" remains a touchstone compendium of that nasty year. No other sci/fi/horror author, before or since, has captured the paranoia of a particular time with such supernatural, black magic volcanism. Warning: The book feels dated but why grouse. Violent, debauched, corny and utterly fascinating, "Black Easter" will give every fan of densely plotted intelligent horror more than a few chills.

This is a thesis novel in the sense that its events seem to have been carefully thought out before Blish even began to write the book - from the first page to the last, he leads the reader towards a powerful and inevitable conclusion. This isn't a work which should be read for `plot surprises', but rather for its tight structure: Blish looks at magic with precise, almost clinical attention; as he set out to do in writing this work, he strips the book of extraneous details and instead confines himself to a select few questions and themes. The four main characters - Black magician Theron Ware, monk and White magician Father Domenico, weapons-maker Baines and his assistant Jack Ginsberg - all play clearly defined roles, each providing the reader a different point of view from which to evaluate what is being said and done. This is a difficult but memorable book.

First off, the fact that this is such a brilliant, pithy, amazingly tight little tome is doubly amazing when one realizes that the quite gifted Mr. Blish also wrote novelizations of Star Trek episodes. Ah well, even the best have to pay rent. Second, there is no finer fictional chronicle of diabolism, either ancient or modern, in English, and none that I know of in most of Earth's other tongues. Each of Blish's characters is deftly crafted with a minimum of prose, a compliment which can extend to the rest of this slight and delicious book; Blish accomplished in a few pages what today's pompous and prolix authors take hundreds of pages to say...Stevie King, though the man can write when he wants to, comes to mind. Finally---and a mild criticism---while it is delightful that Blish takes care to present Malefica as a discipline, it is (or was, for when I first read this I was merely thirteen) somewhat disenchanting to see that Blish gets most of the Satanic formulae, Latin incantations, and demon summoning paraphernalia hopelessly wrong. I have since found older grimoires to draw upon, though, and Black Easter is a work of fiction, so no victim, no foul. All in all a devilishly clever and delightful book; for more nastiness pick up The Day After Judgement, which is actually the third in a trilogy (the first of which was After Such Knowledge).

An excellent book, written on many levels, that follows the final stages of the career of my namesake Therion Ware, who at the bequest of the arms dealer Banes, summons the major devils of Hell and releases them into the world for arts sake. The book, together with its sequel, "The Day After Judgement" is excellent on the level of a science fiction/fantasy novel, but also touches on some interesting theological points, particularly in Satan's final speech which is rather finer than the Milton on which it is based. This book and its sequel should be reissued as soon as possible. .

Though MANY years ago, I remember it so well I have spent the last several months hunting for it again. The ending is the key, and here more than most stories, where the reading is the joy.