A Dread That Creeps

John Buell's Forgotten Noir-Horror Masterpiece

The roman noirs of the post-World War II period trafficked in the horrible. The roman noir, along with its brother genre, the film noir, attempted to pry back the lid of life and expose everyone’s miasmic guts. Crime, deceit, loneliness, and general villainy. These elements make for a great noir. And for a time, the public ate it up. Despite living through the evils of the deadliest war in human history, men, women, and teens spent their hard-earned money on books and movies about the worst people imaginable.

But what about the ultimate evil? Could the Old Enemy work in a noir?

Author William Hjortsberg provided an answer with 1978’s Falling Angel. Later filmed as Angel Heart (1987), Falling Angel tells the woeful tale of private investigator Harry Angel and his search for the missing crooner, Johnny Favorite. Angel’s case throws him into the occult underworld, wherein serious Satanists hobnob with swingers and sexy sadies. And of course, there is Angel’s client — the enigmatic Louis Cyphre. Say the name aloud and you’ll get the gimmick.

Falling Angel is an example of horror-infused noir, as the story relies on elements gleaned from both genres. The hard-living Angel is a stereotypical gumshoe in the known world of crooks and conmen, but his story falls straight to Hell when he realizes that devil worshippers are real and lust for souls.

Hjortsberg’s novel came at the tail-end of the occult craze in film and literature, but right before the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s. Ira Levin’s smash hit novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967) got the genre rolling, but William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) made demonic possession a major theme for the horror genre at large. In many ways, horror is still in the shadow of Blatty (and director William Friedkin), for the most common trope at the cineplex remains demons and demonic possession. One could argue that it is all downstream from Dennis Wheatley and his novel The Devil Rides Out (1934), and one could also say that Blatty’s novel is a marginal rip-off of Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan (1962), but the fact still remains that The Exorcist is the cultural lodestar for all things infernal and diabolic.

Author John Buell. Image via Concordia University.

Between the height of noir and the explosion Satanploitation, a little-known literature professor in Canada penned a slim novel that married the red and the black—noir and satanic horror. John Buell (1927-2013) was a 32-year-old professor at the Anglophone and Catholic Loyola College in Montreal when he published The Pyx in 1959. Buell’s debut novel is set in the seedy underbelly of Montreal, and primarily focuses on the lives of two characters. The first, Elizabeth Lucy, is a heroin addict and high-end prostitute who dies on the first page. The other major protagonist, Henderson, is a homicide investigator tasked with finding out why Lucy fell to her death on that hot summer night. The Pyx uses the style of alternating chapters that drift back and forth between the present and past. As such, Henderson’s case unfolds at the same time as the reader learns more and more about Lucy’s last days. Ultimately, both strands combine inside of a darkened and funereal apartment on Hilton Road.

The Pyx is a quick read at a breezy 132 pages. Despite this, it is a shuddersome, creeping tale that does a lot of shadow play right up until the very end. For the better part of one hundred and twenty pages, Henderson and his partner Cerini investigate a fairly standard murder investigation. Elizabeth’s death connects to a madam and assorted pimps and johns, all of whom are also involved in the drug trade. So far, so normal (for a noir). However, after page 120 or so, the story takes a dark turn. Henderson learns that Elizabeth died with a pyx in her hand. For those of you who are not Papists, the pyx is the container that holds the consecrated host of the Eucharist. Why would a hooker die with a pyx in her hand?

Henderson discovers that Elizabeth spent the last night of her life in the company of the mysterious Keerson. Keerson is a shady character in a world full of suspicious people. However, Henderson and Cerini do not find out about Keerson’s kink until the absolute end of the novel. During the final showdown between Henderson and Keerson, which takes places at the original crime scene, the malevolent businessman utters some truly foul words:

“You looked at Paul when she was changing to go swimming. You saw it. You didn’t really know, it was the first time you had…” And the recital went on into details that puzzled Henderson at first, “…and even though you went to confession,”—a snigger— “you couldn’t forget. You really didn’t want to. It stayed with you in all its...” And then Henderson remembered: a hot summer, so many years ago, he was a boy, not in high-school yet, no, not then, the girls, the awakening, the sexuality, his bothersome “sinfulness.”

Keerson’s knowledge about Henderson’s secret lust is troubling enough, but the odd man also tells the detective that “Keerson” is not his real name. The agitated Keerson continues to say off-kilter things until he begs Henderson to end his suffering. Henderson obliges, but only after Keerson says certain things and makes certain moves that indicate a willingness to kill. The Pyx ends with Keerson’s weeping corpse. He killed Elizabeth Lucy by pushing her off of the high-rise balcony. His reason?

The prostitute had eaten the host from the pyx.

The 1973 film adaptation starring Christopher Plummer and Karen Black makes obvious what Buell’s novel renders subtle: Elizabeth Lucy died in a botched black mass ceremony. The killer Keerson is possessed either by a minor demon or by Old Scratch himself. The word “possession” is never uttered, to be fair, but the acting and writing make it obvious. Tellingly, only the film version of The Pyx speaks of the black mass or devil worship. The Buell original offers only suggestions, and it is up to the reader to piece it all together. Of the two approaches, I prefer the latter, although the black mass scene in the film is easily one of the more disturbing depictions of that infamous ceremony ever committed to celluloid.

The Pyx deserves more praise than it gets, which is to say almost none. Buell’s noir-horror did well enough that it allowed him to pen more novels. He continued to write thrillers and mysteries, but he never again returned to the noir-horror synthesis of The Pyx. Out of all the examples, including Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse (1929) and Jonathan Latimer’s The Fifth Grave (1941), The Pyx is the first one to take supernatural evil, Satanism, and possession seriously without directly saying so. Buell may not have been as good as a writer as Hammett, but his influential novel manages to thread the needle by being action-heavy, suspenseful, and intellectually stimulating. The Pyx is therefore one of the titans of the noir-horror subgenre and should be read and seen for that reason alone.