Moving

This Saturday I'm moving out: to a single bed-room for rent in a shared house, in the proximity of 427 and Finch area. I won't have Internet Access until who knows when - and when I do, I'll probably have Dial-up, only. Until then, I probably won't be posting anything.

A Nightmare World

Salvador Dali The Birth of Liquid Desires, 1932

The Dream in Punish The Sinners - like most Horror fiction - seems to follow something of a Surreal idiom for unconsciously-laden meaning within the novel's occult language of Psychology. When Peter Balsam's girlfriend, Margo slumps into a deep, nightmarish sleep in the wake of discovering the perverse nature of the Society of St. Peter the Martyr's secret meetings, she dreams:

She was outside the rectory, and she knew what was going on inside. But she couldn't stop it. She could only crouch in the darkness outside, listening to the sounds, hearing first the chanting, and then the moaning, knowing that Peter was inside, that he was in the middle of that group of six strange priests, and that they were seducing him. Their hands touching him, and their lips kissing him in a way that only her hand should have touched him, only her lips should have kissed him.

Disturbing images of eldritch 'satanic sexual abuse' committed by the priests of the Order - though this novel predates the American conspiracy of the late 1980s and early 1990s - are evoked in Margo's fear-driven unconscious mind. This is but Margo's baleful unconscious prologue to the neurotic transformations of much deeper tensions which are themselves shockingly left bare:

Then she was suddenly inside the rectory, inside that oddly lit room, watching the naked priests, their wrinkled bodies glistening sweatily in the candlelight as they stripped Peter's clothes from him, their fingers greedily playing over his smooth skin, their tongues clucking away in that strange language. And then they were holding him down and Monsignor Vernon, grown suddenly to a towering height, stood of Peter, his monstrous organ thrusting toward Peter's gaping mouth. The priest began advancing toward Peter, and Margo looked on in horror. She wanted to scream, but couldn't make any sound escape her lips. She tried to lunge forward, tried to rescue Peter from the grasp of the old men, but she couldn't make her feet move. They seemed to be mired in heavy mud. All she could do was look on in mutely fascinated horror as Monsignor Vernon, suddenly enveloped in halo, forced his penis into Peter Balsam's mouth. And finally, as the immense glans disappeared between his lips, she screamed.

The more dangerous issue of Childhood Trauma - the emblazened traumatic image of the post-coital murder of Monsignor Vernon's parents by his disturbed sister - from the opening scene of Punish The Sinner is awakened in the reader unconsciously by Margo's nightmare of priestly sexual abuse. Saul's Psychology of Childhood Traumas - festering undisturbed hitherto, as fear - stalks after the reader's own psyche like mythical Furies with poetically eldritch Memories and Dreams in this novel.

Morbid Streak in the Puritan Imagination

As much as I seem inured to connect John Saul's Punish The Sinners exclusively with the Supernatural Horror of Howard Philip Lovecraft, I would be skewing the novel's expression of a "profoundly morbid streak in the [religious fundamentalist] imagination." I have substituted the interpolation "religious fundamentalist" where Lovecraft originally had written "Puritan" - Saul's American small town of Neilsville, after all, is lorded over by an archaic conservative Catholic Theocracy influenced clandestinely by a "cult-like" Religious Order.

This is the original apocalyptic theme of American literature onward from Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 epistolary novel Wieland, or the Transformation.

The militant Order is: the Society of St. Peter the Martyr. Its six members are dedicated exclusively to bringing about a militant Reformation of the ruling spirit, as well as moral rapture, harkening to the medieval Italian Inquisition of the Catholic Church. Of course Monsignor Vernon, the protagonist, Peter Balsam's former best friend, champions the strict Doctrine of this occult tribunal:

But as the questioning continued, each of the priests taking his turn, Balsam realized that they wanted more of him than a simple statement of his knowledge of the beliefs of the Church. They were trying to determine if there were flaws in his faith; if there were areas in which he was not in agreement with the Doctrines.

Suddenly a spirit of thanatos--or perhaps, libido--besets Neilsville's dense population of young pubescent teen-agers. Neilsville's Theocratic foundation is jarred by a seemingly random outbreak of attempted suicide, carried out by one of the popular girls at the church school. Then, former bonds of kinship begin to crumble further as the suicidal girl gets back at her religiously fanatical snooping mother by withdrawing from her, in effect denying her of any psychological catharsis as a parent. And then the Religious Order seeks to excommunicate the suicidal daughter and her family for this grave Mortal Sin from the Catholic Church.

A brief visionary moment is experienced by one meek, devout, and religious student, Marilyn Crane, however, amidst Balsam's controversial psychology class. Marilyn recalls her charged ethereal glimpse of Mary, the 'Sorrowful Mother' of Jesus with the anti-Semitic Order members standing in the room observing an experimental Relaxation Therapy exercise:

"The priests of the Sanhedrin. The Jews who condemned our Lord. They were here, six of them, and they were watching the Sorrowful Mother. But she wasn't paying any attention to them. She wanted to talk to me. But I don't know why."

See John 18:12-24 for the story identified by Marilyn above.

Miskatonic Country

Changing from Clive Barker's Blood-and-Guts Horror - Books of Blood - to that unexplored country of Supernatural Horror mixed with Modern Psychology in John Saul's 1978, second novel Punish The Sinners has been relatively easy. Saul's novel is essentially a working psycho-analytical session that is told in narrative - allegorically speaking - with the reader visiting like a patient, following Saul's words like a pendulum-swinging chained-watch into hypnosis, guiding the reader with plot and character on a journey back to unearth childhood trauma in the psyche, and eventually confronting this adulthood "fear of the unknown."

I would argue for calling Punish The Sinners Supernatural Horror mixed with Modern Psychology as Saul's writing from the start draws upon literary elements iconographically associated with the story-telling of Lovecraft - without being counterfeit. However, Saul's Punish The Sinners pushes this secret doctrine of Lovecraftian fiction even beyond into an occult language. The novel is replete with its own subliminal connections, or meta-fictional commentaries, artfully incorporated into the dialogue:

"I guess most towns are like that," Margo agreed."You don't really get a feel for them from the downtown area. You have to see where the people live. And even then, it's not easy. People in small towns aren't as friendly as they're supposed to be. Unless you're a native, of course. If you're not, forget it. You're a newcomer for at least twenty years."

"I thought that only happened in New England," Peter laughed.

The gesture is familiar enough, without betraying too much of the authour's sleight of hand. With these occult words Saul invokes the weird spirit of Lovecraft's original Mythical Miskatonic Region--Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich--which was based on New England:

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick'. Here is material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, none can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.

[...] the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.