DISHING

The January issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...features this year's picks for "The 101 Best Dishes in the Valley." Your Humble Narrator is proud to have been one of the authors; see if you can guess my six contributions.

Below, for anyone who might remotely care, is the list of books I finished over this past year. It's an embarrassingly short list this time--not even a book a month!--and for a rather embarrassing reason: I found that my maturity level, already questionable, regressed this year, and I started devouring old comic books to a degree that cut into more substantive reading (I also lost most of a month due to an illness that left me unable to focus on reading, including a weeklong hospital stay in isolation with no reading material).

Still, there were some rich experiences; I finally got around to Babbitt, for instance, having come across an old Signet Classics copy in the take-a-book-leave-a-book shelf at a Rita's Italian Ice joint. What an extraordinary work, and later I came across a fascinating detail about the book's influence. Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien, of all freaking people, was among its admirers; he claimed that the word "Hobbit" derived from "Babbitt" because "Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place." 

Anyway, here's my limited reading list:

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

1922 by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

The Gnomobile by Upton Sinclair

Calendar of Crime by Ellery Queen

Later by Stephen King

CHI DEVIL WOMAN

If you need an intriguing read for October, you might consider...

...The Case Against Satan, a brief 1962 novel by Ray Russell of Sardonicus fame. Somehow I had never heard of this one, now out in a respectable new edition by Penguin Classics if you please, but it's a gripping fast read, and it seems inarguably influential.

Set in a Roman Catholic rectory in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, Russell's book dramatizes an exorcism. At the time, apparently, this rite was so rarely performed and archaic that it was a novelty to readers it would not be a decade later, after the release of William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist and its 1973 movie adaptation popularized the concept.

In Russell's yarn, the possession victim is a pretty teenage girl. The exorcism is performed by a younger priest with a drinking problem and an interest in psychology and other "modern" ideas; he's supervised by his Bishop, an older, more traditional sort. The victim is bound to a bed, and at one point she has an upset tummy to a projectile degree.

In short, the book has broad resemblances to The Exorcist that seem unmistakable. Unlike Blatty, however, Russell leaves matters ambiguous; the story could, however unconvincingly, be interpreted in non-supernatural terms.

The author's narrative tone toward then-contemporary religious attitudes is snarky and contemptuous, referring, at the novel's opening, to the modern idea of God as "...a nodding Santa Claus with twinkling eyes and a spun glass beard..." and to modern religion as "...an unnatural thing of all light and no shadow, a pious bonbon so nice, so sweet, so soporifically bland that a Karl Marx can call it the opium of the people not without justice..." Russell, who died in 1999, lived long enough to see conservative religious attitudes in our culture swing the other direction; I don't know if he was comforted by this change or not.

I, for one, am fervently hoping for the Nodding Santa Claus. That said, if you're looking for a diabolical tale to pass an autumnal evening, rather than revisiting Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist this year I'd suggest you pick the devil you don't know.