DIMITER

From the author of The Exorcist (1971), a halting, unfocused thriller about a series of mysterious events in Jerusalem.

Blatty begins with a numbing, cluttered and confusing prologue, set against the political intrigue and violence in Albania in the 1970s. In a series of sessions, some, for no clear reason, reproduced as transcripts, a man identified as “the Interrogator” attempts to break down “the Prisoner.” The Prisoner remains tight lipped until the Interrogator uses sodium pentothal to get him to talk. In a mysterious feat “never quite understood” the Prisoner takes out his guards and escapes. Three days later, on a Sunday, he appears before seven men in a barn. Back at his office, the Interrogator reflects on his Prisoner, now identified as Dimiter, “the agent from Hell.” Blatty thereupon shifts to Jerusalem and Hadassah Hospital, scene of a murder, the miraculous recovery of a two-year-old from cancer and, “at the end of the hall, something black and quick.” For good measure, there’s also mention of a case of leprosy and, later, the discovery of a body in the tomb of Christ. The narrative mostly turns into a rather unremarkable police procedural as police detective Peter Meral (perhaps the only character with any dimension) takes on the case of American novelist Eddie Shore. Shore, hospitalized for food poisoning, dies suspiciously of cardiac arrest. Then Moses Mayo, a neurologist at Hadassah, dies, and Meral is convinced he was murdered. Periodic references to Dimiter promise to draw together the diffuse plot strands, with Blatty periodically breaking in to suggest that all will come together as he ends several chapters on a portentous note: “ ‘The only cover you can blow now is the lid on his coffin.’ Which, in its way, would later prove to be prophetic.” Cue rain and wind and dreams about Christ’s resurrection from the tomb to add a quasi-mysterious, quasi-spiritual overlay.

A holding pattern that never wants to end.