Book 17 of 26 books for 2024! Hoping to hit 20.

I think everyone on the planet is familiar with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist and the William Friedkin-directed 1973 adaptation, which is widely considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time and inspired countless others. But did you know that there was an earlier novel about two priests fighting to exorcise a demon from a young woman, written by Ray Russell? Let me talk about The Cast Against Satan, which was first published in 1962.

This particular Penguin edition was released in 2015, with a foreword by the incomparable Laird Barron, but it took me ages to get around to reading it.

Ray Russell’s name should be familiar to horror aficionados. His 1961 short story “Sardonicus” is considered to be one of the great horror short stories; it features a cruel and evil man whose face was paralyzed into a rictus by the horrors of his own previous crimes. This man will do anything to free himself of his facial curse, and he extorts a prominent physician to find a cure, with a threat of truly unspeakable consequences if he fails. The story has one of the best and most horrific ending twists I’ve ever read, and it is a favorite of mine, so when I saw that Russell’s 1962 novel had been reprinted, I didn’t hesitate to snap it up.

Before I talk about the novel, however, let me note I got the book at the time that “face-swapping” apps were all the rage on the internet, and I couldn’t help but try a face swap with the book’s cover:

Probably the most horrific thing I’ve ever created!

Father Gregory Sargent has recently been reassigned to a quiet parish in a move that is largely viewed as a demotion. In his new role, he meets Susan Garth, a teenager who has recently been having fits that appear to be centered around the Catholic Church and even being in the presence of a church. When Bishop Crimmings visits and meets Susan, he becomes convinced that she has been possessed by a demon — perhaps even the Devil himself. He recruits a skeptical and unwilling Father Sargent into performing an exorcism in the hopes of curing the girl and saving her soul. But is she truly possessed, or is the cause something more mundane? And what dark secrets lie at the heart of her seeming possession? By the end of the ordeal, someone will have lost their life.

As Barron notes in his foreword, there are no easy answers or explanations in The Case Against Satan, in contrast with The Exorcist, where the reader is quite certain from the beginning that supernatural villains are present. Much of the book is a debate between Crimmings and Sargent about the origin of the “possession” and whether there is a more mundane cause. Crimmings leans towards the supernatural, while Sargent towards the natural. And, true to a novel that is at its heart about faith, by the end of the ordeal the reader is still not completely certain what has transpired (though enough extremely difficult to explain things have happened that one can just as easily consider it supernatural as natural).

The theological and existential discussions of the two religious men are thought-provoking and intriguing, and it is nice to see the two men both portrayed as decent sorts who truly want to do the best they can to help Susan, regardless of the origin of her problem.

There are also familiar staples of exorcism stories, largely made famous by the later Blatty novel: projectile vomiting, strange and seemingly impossible motions of the human body, cursing, seduction, and manipulation by the possessed. I wonder how many of these were based on “historical” accounts of exorcisms and how many were invented by Russell for this novel and later picked up by other authors.

The book is a relatively short read, weighing in at about 150 pages. I found it quite enjoyable and read the whole thing over the course of two evenings. This has gotten me curious to go track down more of Russell’s work — including a reread of Sardonicus!