The following review written by Michael S. Rose originally appeared on CruxNews.com.
A murder mystery spun for and about traditional Catholics
For those not attuned to the more malevolent side of alternative pop culture, there is actually a growing cult of people who fancy themselves vampires: you know, dark capes, oily hair, blanched faces, and outsize canines. At the same time, and this confuses matters for pop-inculturated vamps, a growing number of bona fide Satanic cults are taking their cues from literary vampirism’s staples of blood-sucking and human sacrifice. Both sad groups manifest their faith in the dark side with the morbid trappings of the 19th-century Gothic novel: graveyards, tombstones, skulls, black drapes and bats—the stuff of Halloween.
William L. Biersach’s second novel probes the depths of the supernatural by re-animating both of these anti-cultures, and much of the time he intentionally blurs the boundaries between the two so that one actually is given to wonder what’s fact and what’s fiction.
Even before the opening lines of The Darkness Did Not, Biersach comments that one of his manuscript readers cornered him one night with a burning question: "So, do you believe in vampires?"
Readers may well have the same question for Biersach’s serial protagonist, the cop-turned-priest Father John Baptist. In fact, more than one character asks the hardboiled trad cleric just that. Not one fond of offering a straight reply, Father Baptist keeps the others—and that includes the reader—guessing until the end.
Biersach’s fictional treatment of vampirism is engaging precisely because the possibility of men turning into bats and sleeping in velvet-lined coffins is taken quite seriously by men of great faith (Father Baptist) and little faith (L.A.’s Cardinal Fulbright) alike.
When seven beautiful, young women are found dead, the blood drained out of them through two small puncture wounds in their necks—"it would seem that the murderer had a pair of extra long teeth," observes one brilliant L.A. detective—even the Methodist chief of police realizes this is a case for a Catholic priest.
"I want to hear it from your lips," Father Baptist challenges the chief. "Tell me why you insisted that I get involved."
"Well," huffs the chief reluctantly, "you’re a—well, you’re—"
"Not a Methodist minister," Father clarifies. "If you thought Pastor MacIntosh could help, then surely you would have sought his advice."
"I did," the chief growls. "He said there’s no room in his theology for vampires… He told me to call you."
Of course, Father Baptist is not just any priest, but one who actually believes in the supernatural power of the priesthood. And that’s the whole point. It’s also what differentiates Biersach’s heavily Catholic-laden novel from the contemporary vamp genre offerings of Anne Rice and her imitators. He plays upon Bram Stoker’s late-gothic notion—and it’s a good one—that the bloodsucking undead can be dealt with only by a heavy dose of holiness, Roman Catholic style. That’s why vampires shrink from little other than the crucifix—corpus required—and good old garlic. There’s a reason for this, and not a little theology is tied up therein. Put simply, the vampire is conceived as an anti-priest, vampirism a sort of anti-priesthood. One’s spiritual mission is salvation of the living, the other’s is damnation of the dead (or is it salvation of the undead?). After all, Dracula means devil—and dragon too, incidentally—in one of those venerable Slavic tongues. To be sure, Bram Stoker’s anti-hero, dressed to resemble a 19th century Roman cleric, in many respects resembles the anti-Christ, if not the Devil himself.
With the existence of God and the fallen angel thankfully taken for granted in The Darkness Did Not, much discussion throughout the course of the novel is given to defining the realm of the supernatural. "What is a ghost?" asks the overly observant narrator Martin Feeney, after he witnesses a piano playing itself in the Hollywood home of a long-dead flapper.
Throughout the novel the didactic priest sleuth is always at the ready to clarify the finer points of Catholic tradition, and often it’s a treat. In this case, Father Baptist explains that the saints offer three possibilities for ghosts: First, the ghost may be one of the poor souls in Purgatory who has been permitted to appear to the living in order to provide guidance or comfort. Second, it may be a soul consigned to eternal damnation. And third, the ghost could be a demon imitating a deceased person in order to confuse or demoralize the living.
These carefully drawn distinctions, in fact, are central to the novel. Accordingly, there are those who believe and those who do not. One absolutely brilliant line from Father Baptist resonates throughout the novel, and it’s a paraphrase plucked from the pages of G.K. Chesterton’s fictional Father Brown: "I believe in some things. Therefore, I don’t believe in others." Profound indeed!
Assisting Father Baptist in tracking down the bloodsucking serial murderer is a cadre of both believers and unbelievers. The most memorable of the believer set are the Knights Tumblar, a sort of modern day drone’s club of tradition-obsessed Catholic men who gad about in black ties and tail coats, quoting Belloc and Chesterton. They also kneel in prayer for hours on end at all night vigils and wear five-fold scapulars, so as not to miss out on any available graces.
It is this tuxedo-clad clique that accompanies Father Baptist (dressed in the clerical version of formalwear with cassock and biretta) and his hunchback narrator sidekick to a Hollywood freakshow house peopled with possible suspects mixed in with magicians in opera hats, shapely young lovelies stuffed into squeaky plastic dresses, Calvinist holdovers, and a slew of mundane Hollywood Boulevard types.
It is here in this modern day Wonderland where Father Baptist first encounters his nosferatu quarry. After being invited out into the "magic free" zone of this bizarre estate, the priest notices that the crickets suddenly stop their chirping, his skin becomes itchy, the temperature drops, his glass starts to shake, and a mysterious fog rolls in with two glowing red eyeballs looking on.
At times like this, the story seems more a spoof of one those black-and-white B movies like Dreyer’s Vampyr or Tourneau’s Cat People, in which Simone Simon turns into a cat when she is emotionally aroused—more amusing than scary. In fact, The Darkness Did Not is consciously not horror fiction. We aren’t scared to turn the page nor do we need to keep the hall light on when going to bed after reading a chapter or two. On the whole, the book is much more a meandering social commentary on California-style sexual immorality and Mahony-style Catholicism Lite.
Biersach is at his best when he’s advancing his plot, but with more than a 500-page canvas, he sometimes gets bogged down with details that are wildly gratuitous and only mildly interesting. How many readers, for example, can stomach a four-page description of liturgical benediction—no matter how fond they might be of incense and adoration.
At other times Biersach appears to be amusing himself through the observations of the curmudgeonly Feeney, cracking inside jokes that often fall flat even to those who presumably understand the ecclesiastical allusions. And that’s unfortunate, because it detracts from Biersach’s overall literary purpose: to deconstruct and exploit the vampire genre by overlaying it with a hyper-Catholic superstructure in order to witness the various elements of the supernatural and legerdemain collide. After all, the Gothic genre of the 19th century English novel embodied a Protestant fascination with Roman Catholicism, and was a decidedly anti-Catholic reaction to the perceived threat of Catholic Spain, viz. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Biersach’s effort inverts this ideological bias to deliver, essentially, an anti-Protestant novel.
It would have been a very difficult task without a capable priest assuming the role of hero to the vampire’s anti-hero. Father Baptist is capable indeed—and interesting, likable, and altogether inspiring at times. The same cannot be said of many of the other characters that people the novel. A good number of the ‘believers’ (the Knights Tumblar excluded) are the stereotypical bickering oddballs who, frankly, give traditional Catholics a bad name—a mirror of reality in some ways, I suppose.
When all is said and done, however, The Darkness Did Not, as the title suggests, is about a triumph of belief over unbelief, and as odd as the believers might be, the unbelievers are the sorrier lot.
Michael S. Rose is the author a several books including the New York Times bestseller Goodbye, Good Men. He is an editor for the New Oxford Review.
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