The Night Church
by Whitley Strieber
Simon and Schuster, 1983,
book club edition, 279pp
Think of The Night Church as a great, unfilmed A-level Grade B Horror movie. Where is Val Lewton when we need him?
This is the novel that followed Wolfen and The Hunger, but unlike those it was not filmed. I’d blame the ending and perhaps the fragmented, hugger-mugger feel of the first third of the book. By this I mean that he rushes the plot and keeps things hidden seemingly just to mystify, until finally the characters come into their own and he focuses on their plights and experiences.
To film the beginning you’d probably resort to kaleidoscopic montages and that never works well up front.
It’s a fun read, though, engaging and intelligent. Strieber can write when he concentrates and he tosses in some wonderful moral and ethical considerations, as well as a humdinger of a dilemma for the bridegroom character. There are subtle sexual considerations handled with delicacy and bluntness. The line between brutality and passion is traced to an unsettling termination, for example.
He owes Ira Levin a nod for Rosemary’s Baby, in the gradual realization that the charming, ordinary folks around us may be other than what they seem and in fact part of a claustrophobic conspiracy. This is a common idea, not Levin’s property per se — a later, excellent example of using this notion is found in Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon — and Strieber executes it well enough for his book’s purposes.
He anticipates the Aum Shinri-Kyu cult, which culls highly intelligent and technically trained biochemists and other scientists in order to form a hidden group dedicated to eradicating mankind to make room for something better. You may recall the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The parallels between Strieber’s Night Church, which he imagines as a hidden antichurch stemming from the Roman Catholic church, and the Aum Shinri-Kyu are striking and alarming. Worse, there are no Inquisitors from a secular Vatican to track them down and thwart their destructive agenda.
What fascinates most about this book, though, are the echoes of themes and images that would later surface so dramatically in his terrifying confessional, Communion. A past suppressed by hypnosis of some sort; mental blocks of vivid, but false, images concealing specific, often traumatic, experiences; a sense of unreality and looming dread for no known reason; conspiracies against innocents; otherworldly intelligences focused on changing mankind; science and religion blending; images of eyes watching from the stars; A combined sense of helplessness and importance; and many other blatant or subtle parallels link The Night Church with Communion. And yet The Night Church is horror fiction and Communion purports to be the truth.
We are privy to watching a writer wrestle in fiction with anxieties and uncertainties that will soon surface as a daring confession to the world that he believes he may be visited, and taken, by beings that are other than human, perhaps from another world, and certainly beyond our ability fully to comprehend.
As to that ending: Strieber opts for an ending that may strike many as either disappointing or, worse, a set up for a sequel. However, he does this in part because he doesn’t wish to cheat, and that’s admirable. His ending follows the dictates of the logic on which the entire book is built.
He could well have violated that logic at the end, the way most Hollywood movies do, and too many thrillers, just to throw an emotional sop to the reader, but chose instead to keep things real within the framework he’d set up throughout the book.
This cost him a movie version, I’d bet, but for thinking readers it is a mark of integrity in a writer.
By contrast check out Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg. He violates his book’s logic in the endgame, veering sharply away from the otherwise inescapable conclusion the whole book has led to, in order to avoid that dreaded label of science fiction. He keeps it literary by cutting his own book’s balls off. It’s sad, and oddly enough the movie version does it right and is far better, story-wise, as a result.
Strieber, who’s been called a liar by more scoffers than even this current crop of sociopathic politicians, ends up showing integrity and playing fair. In The Night Church, Strieber offers a suspenseful story that covers many difficult ethical points intelligently and realistically, while not neglecting the creepy stuff. More than that is difficult to ask and more than we usually get.
Worth seeking.
–Gene Stewart
1 Sep 03, Under the Altar
