The Sentinel - Jeffrey Konvitz (Star 1977)
Successful model Alison Parker returns to New York after the death of her father. She returns also to her boyfriend Michael – a man with a past, who may or may not have murdered his wife when she found out about his affair with Allison.
Allison rents an apartment in an old brownstone building on the upper West Side. She’s happy with it, the only curiosity being the old blind priest who sits at a window as if looking out into the world. Allison begins to meet some of the neighbours, eccentrics all – especially old Mr. Chazen and his cat Jezebel. Soon however things start to change, Allison hears footsteps in the apparently empty apartment above her own, and then she is frightened by the predatory lesbian couple who live down the hall.
All the while Allison’s mental state is portrayed as ‘fragile’ and it is revealed she’d made a suicide attempt after finding her drunken and abusive father at home in bed with two women. Michael frequently refers to her being ‘frigid’ and tries to persuade her to confront her troubled past. Allison’s world is further rocked when she approaches the agent who rented her the apartment, the agent reveals there are no other tenants in the building beside her and the old blind priest – no one else has lived there for years. Is she going mad?
Allison’s health begins to deteriorate, she has headaches and nausea, fainting spells that her doctor can’t explain. Michael is mostly unsympathetic, although he claims to love her, he puts her physical state down to psychosomatic illness and the things she’s seen as hallucinations.
Also in the picture is a Detective Gatz, a policeman who believes Michael killed his wife to be with Allison, although all his attempts to prove it are thwarted he can’t let go. Gatz is an added pressure the couple could do without. Allison’s health becomes seriously bad and very slowly Michael grudgingly begins to believe something unnatural is going on. He uncovers a plot by the Catholic Church to replace old blind Father Halliran at the brownstone, with Allison who would become Sister Therese…
Thankfully the climax of the book is effective, it’s had a big build up. The building is revealed to be the portal into the underworld, guarded over for centuries by God’s Sentinel on Earth. We get a glimpse of what is waiting to come through before all is resolved.
Originally written in 1974 (and shows it’s age in places) parts of this book are quite irritating. Allison is frequently shown to be fragile, irrational, often hysterical, frigid and helpless. Michael is a similarly unsympathetic character, generally smug and brash and with quite a violent temper. Konvitz also appears to be fairly anti-gay, the scene where the lesbians get rough with Allison is unpleasant, Allison calls them “sick” and Chazen describes them as “evil”.
And yet, in spite all of the above, I kind of enjoyed it. I always liked those 70's devil/antichrist/possession books & movies.
Sadly I’ve not seen the Michael Winner film made in 1977 but I recall it got a lot of hype, cashing in on the successes of ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. I remember seeing great stills of John Carradine as the blind priest, and reading that they’d (controversially) used physically disabled people at the climax of the film to portray the demons of the underworld.
Now I really want to see the film....
