By the twentieth century, the exorcism had all but vanished, wiped out by modern science and psychology. But Ray Russell resurrected the ritual with his classic 1962 horror novel,giving new rise to the exorcism on page, on screen, and even in real life.
Ray Russell was born in 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, and served in the U. S. Army in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he attended the Chicago Conservatory of Music and the Goodman Memorial Theatre and soon became executive editor of Playboy, where he played a vital role in turning the magazine into a showcase for imaginative fiction. His first novel, The Case Against Satan, was published in 1962, and his best known work, Sardonicus, was called by Stephen King "perhaps the finest example of the modern gothic ever written." Russell received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. He passed away in Los Angeles in 1999. Laird Barron is an award-winning writer of horror fiction. He has received three Shirley Jackson Awards, for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories and for his novella Mysterium Tremendum. He has also been nominated for the Crawford Award, Sturgeon Award, International Horror Guild Award, World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award.
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*
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