Customer Reviews

Black Easter

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

Given the high concept plot, a munitions dealer contracts a black magician to loose all the demons of hell for one night, surprisingly little happens in this short work. That it is actually enjoyable is due to the skill and craft with which Blish writes his prose.

The author states in the foreword he wanted to treat magic as if it were a rigorous discipline in the mold of science or engineering and he succeeds. However this makes the scenes of ritual magic detail heavy and tedious. Nor is their any real build up of tension in the book as you would expect with such a catastrophic event being asked for.

The reason for this is probably the lack of conflict. Though the forces of good appear, and are even represented with an observer, Father Domenico, at the lair of Theron Ware the magician, due to a Covenant between the higher powers he can do nothing but ask Ware not to do it.

The idea is a good one, the execution Blish chose just wasn't that appealing. However the prose is. Blish writes it tightly, and the characters are actually interesting given the little that happens. You'll be left vaguely unsatisfied though as the book doesn't really deliver what it promises. As one reviewer mentions, it really takes place in only two locations and all the demonic carnage happens off page.

Almost as if this was an outline of a longer work, or a novella with a novel screaming to get out.

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.

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.

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).

This isn't a bad book by any means, but it's very period (one gets the impression the author desires to shock, but, almost 40 years later, there's nothing here to ruffle your maiden auntie's delicate feelings, I assure you.)

The book is brief, and tells a simple tale: a gentleman hires a magician to perform a task (after two earlier trials). There, that's it, that's the plot. Nowadays (not that now is better, but we're used to Now) that would be the set-up to the plot ... the book ends just as things are about to get interesting.

There is a sequel, the Day After Judgement, which picks up immediately afterward but which also somewhat disappoints.

Another fault--well, not a fault necessarily, but certainly a less-engaging choice--is that the horrors one might expect in a book about black magic are entirely played offstage, and only referred to. Imagine a Lord of the Rings with passages like "two weeks later they decided to go through Moria, where Gandalf died, unfortunately, fighting a Balrog. Still, with Lothlorien ahead, the Fellowship was somewhat optimistic." It's not a good thing.

There is a demon fashion-show/parade near the end which is worth a chuckle, but it's still not scary.

Blish' A Case of Conscience is much more compelling reading, so go there instead--unless you're a completist, or in the mood for a brief, non-unnerving look at the dark arts, circa 1967.

Note: a 3 star ranking from me is actually fairly good; I reserve 4 stars for tremendously good works, and 5 only for the rare few that are or ought to be classic; unfortunately most books published are 2 or less.

He meant it to be a bleak vision, but it is also some of the funniest religious satire I've ever seen.

Blish in this book shows he is far above the average fantasy world building of the normal sci fi novel. With both comic and dramatic elements, Blish is quite transparently echoing in art actual events of the 60s. If one has Baines as Lyndon Baines Johnson, Theron Ware as Nelson Rockefellar, and Ginsberg as Jack or Robert Kennedy, it is quite possible to see the whole scope of the plans of the group that took over the USA at Kennedy's assassination. Baines is a arms merchant, LBJ is the starter of the vietnam war, Ware is the magician who plays a word game with the world and who has compacts with many devils (people who had killed members of their family or who had been conditioned by anal means to obey without question). Ginsberg (Kennedy) is obsessed by sex and is provided with women by Ware (Rockefellar. Father Garelli is the Roman Catholic priest who is present as an observer throughout the whole process. He signifies the Roman Catholic church, who has made a deal with the devil to get rid of Communism.

The city of Dis appears in Death Valley and begins to rule the world, perhaps a reminder of Los Angeles under the rule of the anal sex religion called "Allah" which apparently is very powerful there.

The releasing of the demons onto the world by Ware is the taking over of the world by severely psychologically conditioned people, as happened in the 70s. The chastening, sterialization and controlled proscribing of the dominant peoples by their victims currently goes on.

The reader can see for themselves if the final scene, where the four protaganists appear before Satan in Hell and receives a miltonic verse reply, takes place or has meaning. Let's hope the nucleur bombing of Rome or Dis in death valley never takes place.

A peculiar mixture of excellent descriptive writing and very poor theology. It stays in the memory but one wonders what the point is (ignore the bizarre speculations of the previous reviewer who has got it all wrong. LBJ didn't start the war in Vietnam by the way). It shows Blish's odd combination of literary strengths and philosophical weaknesses.