The case against Satan - Ray Russell

By the 20th century, the centuries-old Roman Catholic exorcism ritual for combatting demonic possession was all but dead, eviscerated by the ascent of modern science and rationalism. But Ray Russell's 1962 novel, The Case Against Satan, set the stage for a proliferation of exorcisms on page, screen, and even bizarrely, in real life.

Just a few weeks ago, Susan Garth was "a very good girl, a clean-talking sweet little girl" of high school age. But that was before she started having "fits"-a sudden aversion to churches and a newfound fondness for vulgarity. If not madness, then the answer must be demonic possession, for which there is only one response: exorcism.

RAY RUSSELL was born in 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, and served in the United States Air Force during World War II in the South Pacific. After the war, he attended the Chicago Conservatory of Music and eventually joined the editorial staff at Playboy, where he published such writers as Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, Robert Bloch, and Charles Beaumont. His best-known work, 'Sardonicus', was called by Stephen King 'perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written'. He died in Los Angeles in 1999.

Provocative, shocking, moving
Kirkus Reviews

[Sardonicus is] perhaps the finest example of the modern gothic ever written
Stephen King

Russell links postpulp literature and the Grand Grand Guignol tradition with the modern sensibilities of America in the 1960s... a fascinating combination of the liberal and the heretic
Guillermo del Toro