Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve noticed, are intensely mystifying. Not in their subject matter, but rather in their very existence – and one of the latest examples is the lovely new Penguin edition of Ray Russell’s 1962 debut novel The Case Against Satan, with a new Introduction by horror novelist Laird Barron.

After serving in WWII, Russell eventually became executive editor of Playboy and published big-name authors like Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Matheson. He went on to write a stack of screenplays and a dozen books in addition to The Case Against Satan, which Barron calls “a primary source in the modern iteration of gothic horror” and notes as a precedent to a “new wave” of horror novels that included Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and William Blatty’s The Exorcist.

The mention of Blatty’s book is key. The Case Against Satan came out in 1962 and sank like a stone, critically and commercially. The Exorcist came out in 1971 and sold like fresh griddle-cakes, and then two years later its author adapted it as a screenplay for an enormously successful movie adaptation, which prompted the sale of roughly a squintillion more copies of the book. Precedence or no precedence, in terms of cultural impact it should be Blatty’s book that’s a Penguin Classic, not Russell’s.

But that wouldn’t clear up the mystification, because both books stink. They don’t stink in quite the same way: Blatty was simply a talentless poser, purveying unreadable schlock; Russell, by contrast, was an old-style hack with a first-rate second-rate education – had he been born a generation earlier, he’d have made a fortune writing Death Comes to Dinner-style melodramas for the peppery Broadway of the time, and he never lost his keen ear for dialogue nor his keen sense of melodramatic pacing. His books definitely deserve your next rainy afternoon.

They just don’t deserve immortality, or the Penguin approximation, and The Case Against Satan is a good case-in-point. It’s the story of an alcoholic priest who’s confronted with a teenage girl named Susan Garth who’s suddenly behaving very strangely, cursing and avoiding churches and, at one point, attacking a priest. Her single father is at his wit’s end, and our priest is forced to face a possibility for which not all his years in seminary had prepared him:

It was never as if he lacked faith or doubted the existence of God. The idea of God sustained him. It is not difficult to believe in God. God is goodness, for which all men yearn; He is the fountainhead of life; He is Our Father Who Art in Heaven, a great concept, and there is nothing loftier, nothing nobler, nothing more dignified, nothing more awesome. “God is not mocked,” for such a figure is beyond mockery; but the Devil is and has been mocked down through the centuries – he has a sideshow puppet, a mustache-twirling city slicker, a costume for stage magicians, a trademark for a laxative water. No, it is not difficult to believe in God – the very flesh reaches out for such belief – but for an intelligent man of the twentieth century to wipe his mind the centuries of ridicule that have been heaped upon the Devil, for him to take the Devil seriously, as seriously as he takes God; that is difficult. And yet to fail is heresy.

Am I a heretic? Gregory thought with a stunning horror. Am I no longer a priest of God?

And – he asked himself – if this is true, how long have I known it? How long have I perhaps tried to wash it away that knowledge with liquor?

You can see at once the problem: this is quintessential lazy hack writing (“His is Our Father Who Art in Heaven,” etc.), and it’s staginess isn’t at all absolved by that more-interesting final line about washing away doubt with liquor, since that, too, is lazy hack writing, as much a part of the dime Westerns Russell eagerly consumed as was holster leather.

It’s like this all throughout The Case Against Satan, as the girl’s increasingly strange behavior begins to elicit even stranger behavior from her father, whose dark secrets are revealed in a climactic scene that takes place, as if you couldn’t guess, on a dark and stormy night. Mr. Garth never acts any different from the standard “Hey pal, what are you trying to imply?” guilty blowhard from every single week’s episode of The Twilight Zone, and he’s not the only cardboard character by a long-shot. Certainly all the priests in the book also qualify, and as a kindly gesture, Russell also throws in that staple of 1950s cheesy melodrama, the Incredibly Oblivious Housekeeper, in this case dear Mrs. Farley, who’s still thinking “priests were queer ones and no mistake, bless them,” long, long after a normal housekeeper would have run screaming for the hills, until you just want to sigh while watching Russell type this stuff out:

Ah, things had not been the same at St. Michael’s ever since the girl had started coming to Father Halloran with her troubles. That poor man had been plagued enough by that looney one, and now it was Father Sargent that had the cross to bear. A booby hatch was where she belonged, the wild creature. A paddle across her round little bottom … knock a little sense into her, a little of wildness and looniness out of her …

But no. Treat her gentle. Be nice as pie to her. Priests were queer ones entirely.

The aforementioned climax is well-done, as you’d expect from an old workhorse like Russell who knows not to disappoint the paying customer. And he leaves the shot and incident of his plot sufficiently ambiguously resolved as to give readers the seeming freedom to see Satan or simple child abuse at the heart of the matter. But subtlety is not only beyond writers like Russell, it’s also anathema to them – they typically can’t resist the hack’s parting gesture. Russell certainly can’t, although he leaves it for his Author’s Note, in which he dutifully enumerates the actual case of Catholic exorcism (in Iowa, of all places!) that inspired his tale, dutifully warns the readers that he’s embroidered the facts with fiction, as novelists are expected to do, and then … well …:

The following, however, is not fiction.

While I was working on Chapter XIII, in which the exorcism ritual culminates in the words, “Begone, Satan!” I was annoyed by the sudden appearance in my study of a large horsefly, almost the size of a bee, which buzzed about my head and kept me from working. It was not yet “fly weather” and, in addition, my windows were tightly closed. I was forced to interrupt the writing of the chapter, roll up a newspaper, and take time out to kill the intruder. Settling down to resume work, I had scarcely typed a half dozen more lines of the ritual when I was “attacked” by a second fly of the same size. Stopping work again, I killed the pest as I had killed the first. There were to be four such flies in all, each presenting itself only after the preceding fly had been killed. The flies stopped coming after I had typed the words of exorcism, “Begone, Satan!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how it’s done. But in the same “classics” line with Tolstoy and Austen? Mystifying.