Carmen > Recent Status Updates

In Paris you can live in the most luxurious apartment and the scum of the city will still wash up at your door on occasion.

A big sprawl of ivy growing all over the front of it which looks like a creeping dark stain.

I need a proper coat. But there's always been a lot of things I need that I'm never going to get.

He watches the lock turn. Someone is unlocking his door from the outside. Someone who has a key, but no business coming in here uninvited.

It's a beautiful building, but there's something rotten at its heart. Now he's discovered it he can smell the stench of it everywhere.
...
She's never been good at just PLAYING THE GAME. Never understood how much easier it makes life if you just give people what they want, tell them what they want to hear.

THE END

Review to come.

It's crazy how this priest is SO against believing in demons. He is willing to believe in ANYTHING: telekinesis, pyrokinesis, ESP, etc. etc. etc. as if it is ABSOLUTE scientific fact, rather than demons.

Watching them steadily ascending the staircase, Chris felt deeply and strangely moved. Here comes my big brother to beat your brains in, creep! It was a feeling, she thought, much like that. She could feel her heart begin to beat faster.

And now your urge is to hide your children when priests come around. This book's biggest weakness, IMO. Looking at it with 2023 eyes is doubly disturbing.

He unbuttoned the right sleeve of his starched white shirt and rolled it up, exposing a matting of fine brown hairs on a bulging, thickly muscled forearm.

She nodded and started opening the door, and it was then that Karras felt it: a chill, tugging warning. It scraped through the bloodstream like particles of ice.

His voice was cradling, stripping her of burden, as his powerful hands clasped gently together. They were large and yet sensitive: veined Michelangelos. Chris felt her gaze somehow drawn to them instantly.

Uh-huh.

Well, here's the scene where she masturbates with the crucifix, or probably it's more accurate to say she is raped with it, and she turns her head fully around.

I have to say the combination of The Catholic Church and sex/rape involving children in this book, in 2023, is making me sickened and probably not in the way Blatty was intending. This priest/child/rape combo is not a good look in hindsight.

Oh, yes, the murderous, dangerous potheads. LOL

More meat to this book than I thought.

Karras glanced up and felt aching dismay, felt the soft crushing weight, press of lead, press of bone, as he recognized the priest who had come to him recently for counseling, the one who could not make friends.

For a moment, Kinderman stared down; then, slowly and gently, he pulled back the sheet to expose what he'd seen and yet could not accept.

-----'s head was turned completely around, facing backward.

Abruptly the psychiatrist gasped in startled pain as he realized with horrified incredulity that Regan was squeezing his scrotum with a hand that had gripped him like an iron talon. Eyes wide-staring, he struggled to free himself. He couldn't.

Silence. Then something curious happened: Regan's breath turned suddenly foul. It was thick, like a current. The psychiatrist smelled it from two feet away. He shone the penlight on Regan's face.

Chris stifled a gasp. Her daughter's features were contorting into a malevolent mask: lips pulling tautly into opposite directions, tumefied tongue lolling wolfish from her mouth.

Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hissed sibilantly like a serpent.

He'd been drunk. He had stumbled. He had fallen down the steep flight of steps beside the house, fallen far to the bottom, where a passing pedestrian on M Street watched as he tumbled into night without end. A broken neck.

"Can't I do it myself?" Chris asked worriedly.

"Why not a nurse?"

She did not want to mention her deep distrust of doctors and nurses.

I can't blame her.

The following morning, the book about devil worship had vanished from the table.

No one noticed.

DUM dum DUMMMMMMMM

Chris nodded and glanced at the title of the book: A Study of Devil Worship and Related Occult Phenomena.

Now they think she has epilepsy. At least they are taking her off the Ritalin.

"You talked to her?"

"Yes. That's why I thought I'd better call you. What the hell's going on with her?"

"What are you getting at?"

"She just called me a 'cocksucker' and hung up the phone."

When Regan abruptly sat up and spat in his face, he instructed a nurse to remain in the room and returned to his office to talk to Chris.

As Karras examined it, the pastor explained that someone had slipped in a typewritten sheet between the card and its cover. The ersatz text, though containing some strikeovers and various typographical errors, was in basically fluent and intelligible Latin and described in vivid, erotic detail and imagined homosexual encounter involving the Blessed Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.

"That's enough, now, you don't

Then forced a look of interest as the moody young visitor gradually unfolded a familiar problem: the terrible loneliness of priests.

Of all the anxieties Karras encountered among the community, this one had lately become the most prevalent. Cut off from their families as well as from women, many of the Jesuits were also fearful of expressing affection for fellow priests; of forming deep and loving friendships.

They brought her to an ending in a crowded cemetery where the gravestones cried for breath.

Chris turned. And gasped on seeing Regan in her nightgown, urinating gushingly onto the rug. Staring fixedly at the astronaut, she intoned in a lifeless voice, "You're going to die up there."