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.