Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers.
In the final chapter of Elsewhere, William Peter Blatty’s negligible trouvaille — by which I mean someone clearly found this novella at the bottom of a drawer, dusted it off, and sent it along to the editors of Cemetery Dance Publications in the interests of making a buck — the departing spirit of a gay Pulitzer Prize–winning author named Terrence Dare offers the following kiss-off to the literary set: “Adieu, sucky speed-reading critics and reviewers!” hollers he, then promptly migrates to another, better and less judgmental plane of existence where critics and reviewers are not sucky, have all the time in the world, only review great books, get a lot of money for it, and always have nice things to say.
Ahem. The spoiler alert I am now delivering has come a couple of paragraphs too late if you’re the kind of reader who picks up a book for plot alone. Yes, Dare is dead, and now I might as well tell you, so is everyone else cooped up at Elsewhere, a haunted house on a haunted island in the middle of the Hudson within view of the skyline of Manhattan — only some of them don’t know it yet. In addition to the gay novelist, Elsewhere’s dead inhabitants are Joan Freeboard, a ravenously materialistic and cut-throat realtor; the “renowned British psychic Anna Trawley”; the mysterious NYU ghost-hunting professor Gabriel Case; and his even more mysterious assistant, the odd-looking but somehow luscious Morna.
Joan, who can’t resist a real-estate challenge, dreams up a wacky scheme to unload the drafty old pile via a publicity-stunt séance uniting the talents of the above-mentioned stereotypes. Needless to say, various otherworldly shenanigans ensue, featuring her demise, ghostly Jesuit priests’ throwing holy water all over the place, and a Satanic basement crypt that won’t stay locked. Meanwhile, a spooky Lassie lookalike gambols about. Little in the way of back story intrudes. The characters, thinly drawn except for minutely detailed descriptions of their clothing, don’t exactly communicate. Dialogue, especially between Joan and Dare, might better be described as repartee, reminiscent of the verbal sparring of, say, Roz Russell and Melvyn Douglas in Ants in Your Pants of 1937.
Indeed, a strange sort of anachronism lifts off many of the details in Elsewhere, like the smell of mothballs curling out of your grandmother’s closet. The story is supposedly laid in 1993 and 1997 — Clinton and Bush are mentioned in passing — but seems to emanate from a world without cell phones or the Internet; a world where Cole Porter and Artie Shaw still matter; a world of rotary phones, three-martini lunches, and cablegrams. Anna Trawley gets one of the latter, summoning her to Elsewhere. When was the last time. Stop. That happened. Stop? In other words, Elsewhere takes place in the world as William Peter Blatty understood it during his years of Hollywood glory; a world where the now octogenarian Blatty is understandably as stuck as are his characters in their haunted house.
Blatty made a fine and amazingly lucrative career for himself in the mid-century American pop-cultural scene, initially writing comic novels (Which Way to Mecca, Jack?; John Goldfarb, Please Come Home; etc.) and then moving on to screenwriting. He worked with the likes of Blake Edwards, Frank Tashlin, Shirley MacLaine, and James Coburn before holing up in the woods near Lake Tahoe to write The Exorcist. That book, as everyone knows, was made by William Friedkin into the massively successful movie with Linda Blair that still scares the pants off everyone, many years and gallons of pea-soup vomit later. Blatty remains a Hollywood writer; his big ideas are derivative, pitchable, and high-concept; his prose reads more like the stuff you’ll find in a film treatment.
Elsewhere, a ghost story that takes place in a haunted house, is of course a work of genre fiction, and were it a DVD, would be listed under Horror on the Netflix website. But this isn’t quite right. The novella is more specifically part of a particular subgenre: the ghost story about characters who are dead but who can’t come to grips with the fact of their own deadness. They are not regular ghosts but philosophic ghosts haunting themselves who need a good hard shove across the border into the Shadowlands. We ourselves, in short, are the ghosts, and the ghosts are us.
There exist a few excellent haunted-house novels going back to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and including William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland; Paul Gallico’s Too Many Ghosts; and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, made into that scary 1963 movie starring Julie Harris. (The scene in The Haunting where the bedroom doors bend in as if they are made of rubber really creeps me out, though not when Blatty steals it in Elsewhere.) The subgenre of ghosts haunting themselves is a more recent Hollywood invention. Between Two Worlds with John Garfield — remember that one? — was an early example; a couple of Twilight Zone episodes fit the subgenre neatly; more recently there’s been The Others with Nicole Kidman, and The Sixth Sense, with Bruce Willis, each cast in the recurring role of the ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead.
Genres are tough, resilient things: hard to exhaust, partaking as they do of myth and universal subconscious symbols. But subgenres are relatively limited; two or three examples will wear them out. Unfortunately Elsewhere mines the already exhausted self-haunting-ghost subgenre and finds no ore at the bottom of the shaft. Plot is the point of this small book; characterization, psychological insight, prose, and dialogue are unimportant. But when the plot is the only point, that plot must contribute something new, and Elsewhere’s doesn’t.
This sucky speed-reading critic, haunted by the possibility that he actually was one, decided to reread Elsewhere after the initial speed-reading of ten minutes twenty seconds. Unlike with Swann’s Way, something big and incomprehensible by Pynchon, or Joyce’s Ulysses, the extra effort was not rewarded with additional discoveries and insights and involved a good deal of suffering. But then my job is analogous to that of a taster at a Medici banquet. We’re there to see if the spiced capon is poisoned; if it is, we die so the duke doesn’t have to. Thus, dear reader, I have saved you the trouble: I’m dead, William Peter Blatty’s Elsewhere killed me. I just don’t know it yet.
– Robert Girardi is a novelist who lives in Washington, D.C. His new novel, Gorgeous East, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in October 2009. He can be reached at Lgirardi@aol.com.