Now that I’m done pontificating about the Divine Comedy, I’ll take it down a notch and look at James Blish’s modern-day occult fantasy novel Black Easter. Most reprintings collect Black Easter with its sequel, The Day After Judgment, as one work under the title The Devil’s Day. Given Black Easter’s abrupt ending — I hesitate even to call it a cliffhanger — the Devil’s Day format is the best package. Although the tale goes a little flat in the second half, if “modern-day occult fantasy” sounds like something you would be interested in, you will like this book.
Cover of the combined version. Fairly tame by the standards of Baen.
After some exposition of a Church-sanctioned order of white magic-practicing monks receiving certain ominous portents, one of their number — a Father Domenico — journeys to the Italian villa of the black magician Theron Ware in order to monitor his activities. Here the real story begins. Ware, funded by the nihilistic CEO of a large defense contractors, seeks to use ceremonial magic to literally unleash Hell upon the world for a single night.
Once this happens, Theron Ware steals the show. Blish makes it very clear early on that, in this book, magic is real and works through the influence of the inhabitants of Hell — exposition that serves doubly both for the reader and for Ware’s skeptical patron. The author obviously did a lot of research, and Ware is an impressive creation, a man who who has negotiated pacts with dozens of infernal powers speaking with a lecturing-professor combination of seriousness and confidence.
Blish clearly researched at least a substantial handful of grimoires and alchemical/occult texts, and his portrayal of the geography of Hell in the second half is explicitly Dantean.
The first half — Black Easter — in which Ware demonstrates and explains his power, prepares his fiendish ritual, and finally carries it out exceeds the latter half — in which it turns out that Ware has called up what he cannot put down — by far. The second half spends far too much time watching Strategic Air Command nuke Hell. Rather silly. Through Ware’s character, Blish manages to convey the exalted status of Satan among the “Descending Hierarchy”. Thus he makes a suitable impression when he appears at the very end lamenting the ironic condition imposed by the story’s blasphemous finale in somewhat derivative but very competent blank verse (suck it, Dan Simmons).
What little I’ve read of James Blish impresses me with his willingness to “go the extra mile” conceptually, so to speak. If the book described above isn’t your cup of tea, consider starting with his short story “Surface Tension”, about a race of microscopic humans living underwater.
Nice cover, but ignore the tagline.
1 Pingback