Hell on Earth: Golgotha Falls by Frank De Felitta

I bought this at a thrift store a long ago, and it wasn’t until after that I saw that Valancourt Books had reissued it in 2014. That fact together with the old cover art made it seem promising. Soon after picking it up, I read Stephen King shit-talking Frank De Felitta in Danse Macabre, and I knew that this isn’t Frank’s most popular book, so I left it on the backburner for a few years. In the meantime I got a copy of Valancourt’s audiobook version, and just before Christmas I decided I needed to read a book about Satan to get me through the holidays.

This is a story about a church that has been taken over by the Devil. Whenever a priest enters the church, the Devil enters the priest and makes him do horrible things. I was quite surprised by the level of depraved blasphemy featured in here. There’s all kinds of necrophilia and bestiality. There’s even a cool bit where two gay goats come into the church and sodomise each other on the altar. It’s a bit like the artwork on war metal records.

Unfortunately, a Jesuit priest comes to exorcise the church. He allows 2 Harvard parapsychologists to monitor the exorcism. The Devil shows up and starts to fuck with them, but eventually the Pope shows up and saves the day.

Ok, technically, I have just spoiled the ending for you, but it doesn’t seem to me that anything could make that ending any worse. The fucking Pope? The only good thing about the book is the unholy depravity it contains, and de Felitta has to go and ruin that by giving it a “Catholicism saves the day” ending. This would have been such a satisfying book if the Pope had shown up at the end only to become possessed by Satan.

A lot of the novel is taken up with the boring relationship between the parapsychologists. This part sucked. Neither of them are interesting. I want satanic homogoats defiling the house of Christ, not two boring dweebs who get turned on by looking under each other’s chakras.

Overall, this book was quite bad. There’s a few entertaining passages, but it’s mostly quite boring. It took me ages to finish it.

Now, I mentioned above that I had an audiobook version of the book. Unfortunately this was one of the worst audiobook experiences I have ever had, and I had to get through most of it with the physical book. The narrator, for some reason only known to himself, chose to give the Jesuit character a “Scottish” accent despite the fact that the character is from Boston. This is weird, but it’s made excruciating by the fact that the narrator is not capable of speaking with a Scottish accent. He sounds like an Iranian pirate with a mouthful of kiwis pretending to be Shrek. Honestly, it’s shocking how poor it is. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say half the time. There’s an Italian character in here too, and that accent was almost identical. The narrator seems to be capable of two voices: regular and foreign. Bizarrely, the Pope character doesn’t get an accent even though it is explicitly stated that he is Sicilian. The only reason I think it was a Scottish accent that this guy was putting on is that the character’s name is Eamon Malcom. I am assuming the narrator recognised Malcolm as a Scottish name from reading Macbeth in school. Eamon is an Irish name, but if I thought for one second that even a single person in the world thought that I sounded like this twat narrator, I’d kill myself.

Seriously, if you’re going to be a narrator, don’t put on accents unless you can actually do them properly. Even then, don’t do them. It’s the equivalent of a cashier at a supermarket attempting to juggle your groceries while scanning them. It probably won’t work, and even if it does, it won’t make anything better. Just do your job and read the fucking book properly.

Frank de Felitta’s most popular book is Audrey Rose. (This is made apparent by the fact that that title takes up as much space the cover of Golgotha Falls as its own title.) I won’t say I’ll never read it, but I have no desire to do so at the moment. He has another one called The Entity that sounds a bit more interesting. Maybe someday.