Horror Review: The Devil's Kiss by William W. Johnstone (1980, Pinnacle Books)

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This, friends, is the book that started it all. William Wallace Johnstone spent a decade playing the "fake it 'til you make it" game with his writing, and after ten long years of editors reading his manuscripts and herniating themselves into an early grave from laughter, somebody at Kensington with no sense of humor plucked The Devil's Kiss off the slush pile and said, "Let's publish this guy. What's the worst that could happen?"

Now, almost four decades later, with over four hundred books to his name and a legacy that lives on like a testosterone-poisoned V.C. Andrews, the Johnstone name is still parting good ol' boys from their hard-earned money despite the man behind it being dead since 2004. Having concluded my jaunt through this 450-page tribute to Jesus Christ, the Republican party, incest, and sodomy, I'm at a loss for words. Not because I'm reeling from what I just read, but because I have no idea how to review this book without repeating myself.

See, this ain't my first Johnstone rodeo. From the 80's on up through the mid-90's, Johnstone utterly ruled the horror market. The fervor and fury with which this man cranked out manuscripts must have seen him going through typewriters the way I go through toilet paper after a night of too much Long John Silver's. And I've made it my personal mission in life to read and review every last horror novel the guy wrote.

Because of course I have.

I've already worked my way through Bats, Toy Cemetery, and (most recently) Night Mask, but I figured before I got any further, I should probably go back to where it all started and see if Johnstone was always a few degrees short of a protractor, or if this madness developed later in his career.

My wife feels there are better things to spend money on that old horror novels, and despite how wrong she is on this front, one can't deny that collecting Johnstone's back catalog of horror books certainly bends one's wallet over the sawhorse. Nevertheless, finding myself in possession of more money than sense, I sprung for a full run of Johnstone's "The Devil" trilogy quadrilogy series, of which The Devil's Kiss is book one, and started reading.

Folks, let me tell you something: if you thought the "Left Behind" series needed more people shooting their guns instead of their mouths, if you got irritated that LaHaye and Jenkins kept cutting away from all the good parts (the sodomy, incest, and devil worship) then you're in for a treat. Nobody so earnestly, diligently, and hilariously describes mankind's various last stands against the forces of Ol' Scratch like Johnstone, and The Devil's Kiss proves beyond a shadow of a doubt how ridiculously seriously he took the idea of Armageddon.

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The Devil's Kiss is the story of Sam Balon, a preacher in the small Great Plains community of Whitfield, Nebraska circa 1958. The fictional town of Whitfield is located within the equally-fictional Fork County, though based on his description of its size and location, my guess is Johnstone modeled Fork on the real-life Cherry County, Nebraska (which is both large and largely uninhabited). At the start of the story, Balon knows there's something rotten in Whitfield, he just can't figure out what.

People have gone missing, church attendance is dropping all across the board (Whitfield has no shortage of churches despite serving a population in the very, very low four-digits), and there's been quite a number of queer goings-on ever since Black Wilder and his team of archaeologists started digging around the standing stones searching for who knows what. What's more, the community itself seems to have turned actively hostile against its own members: kids disappear all the time, formerly friendly neighbors now give each other the side-eye, and teenagers are being exceptionally defiant towards their elders. Even Sam's wife Michelle is stepping out on him, shacking up with other locals on Friday night, and coming home Saturday morning reeking of booze, body odor, and sex.

Sam may not know what's going on, but his Army training is telling him there's a fight a-brewing in Whitfield. Some men might turn tail and run, but not Sam Balon. A rugged, manly man of action, Balon served with the United Nations Partisan Infantry Korea (UNPIK) during the Korean War, a guerrilla commando group which served as a precursor to the modern-day US Special Forces, prior to taking up the business of soul winning. As Johnstone puts it:

The devil despises the Sam Balon's of the world, and would prefer to stay away from them.

Naturally the devil of this world does nothing of the sort, otherwise this would be a real short story. Instead, the devil sends his agents, warlock Black Wilder and witch Nydia, to Whitfield. Their mission: turn the community away from God to instead service Satan. They do this by first taking over the local radio station so it can broadcast that newfangled Rock 'n Roll and Country music, thus ensuring all the kids turn into rebellious little shits, even more eager to disobey their parents than normal. Then they'll use the time-honored tradition of blood sacrifice, orgies, and promises of eternal power to seduce their flock to the Dark Side. If any of that doesn't work, there's always sodomy, incest, bestiality, child rape, and torture to fall back on.

The only thing they have to worry about are the handful of citizens they can't turn to the dark side. Hell's about to break loose in Nebraska, where a small handful of true believers have to somehow stave off not just their neighbors, but also the risen dead and a force of werewolf-like beasts to keep Satan from prevailing. Sam Balon doesn't realize it, but he's been nominated by God to be His champion. But how can mortal men and women stand against the ultimate, eternal embodiment of everything evil and profane?

Perhaps, you are thinking, through the power of righteousness in some form of mass ritual, song, or exorcism that can save the people of Whitfield from the path of damnation?

Or maybe prayer: the right words spoken at the right time to drive the Devil from his conquest?

Maybe you're a Celine Dion fan, and assume that the power of love will conquer all? Or maybe the ones committing the evil need to be forgiven, as Christ taught in his sermons about turning the other cheek, giving to the poor, and being unconcerned with worldly goods?

Nah, bro. This is William W. Johnstone.

Balon's gonna save the town and its inhabitants by burning it to the ground, blowing it sky-high with dynamite, dropping its vile residents in hails of gunfire, executing his current wife with a stake through the heart, porking his new wife until she's pregnant with his son, then boning the coven's high priestess across time and space until she's carrying his daughter. Now that's a plan Jesus could truly get behind, am I right?

I feel like I'm forgetting something here.

Oh yeah! Spoiler alert!

Uh... My bad.

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If all I just wrote has you itching to pay damn near twenty bucks for your own copy, there's something you should know. The Devil's Kiss is 449 pages long, and around 400 of those pages are devoted to the main characters standing around talking to one another so they can explain what's going on to the reader. Balon talks to one friend about what he's seen, the friend talks back about what they've seen, then Balon drives around town for a little while mulling stuff over in his head before stopping to talk with somebody else he feels he can trust. Black Wilder and Nydia spend pages painstakingly expressing the rules of the game they (and Satan) have to follow, what they're going to do to the people they manage to convert, what they're going to do to the people who won't give up their faith in God, then reiterating those plans a few chapters later.

For a guy made out to be a man's man among men, Sam Balon sure spends a lot of time flapping his gums. Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Wait a minute here, ModernZorker...Sam's a preacher! You don't expect him to just pick up a gun and start killing people, do you?"

Well, eventually, but that's not the point. This is a Johnstone book -- if the guy doesn't turn out to have a belt-fed .50-cal in his nuke-proof basement, everybody's gonna be disappointed. But you gotta admit, all the iteratin' and reiteratin' going on in here makes it feel like he was getting paid by the word. The suspicions and preparations for the eventual siege consume 360 of this book's pages. Now, sure, it's spiced up with the occasional 'parents come home to find their kids having sex' scenes, 'Beasts chewing up corpses' scenes, and "Great Jumpin' Jehoshaphat, that guy's humpin' another guy!" scenes. There's also some fairly awkward lovemaking, your run-of-the-mill blood orgies, and a few references to the fact horses are hung like Sam Balon to make sure the pearls are well and truly clutched, but Johnstone's so excited somebody bought his manuscript that he's got to let everybody know how much he knows about armed combat, unarmed combat, explosives, the Bible, and general not-being-a-pussy-ness.

For reference, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park -- a book about goddamn dinosaurs eating people in Costa Rica, the science behind their creation, and one guy explaining why making them was an awful idea -- runs a mere 400 pages in my paperback copy. In the movie, Ian Malcolm is hilarious because he's played by Jeff Goldblum pretending to be a mathematician. In the book, Malcolm is a groan-inducing drag who underscores why mathematicians never get invited to the cool parties in college. He's absolutely a Crichton self-insert, but he's hardly the main character.

In The Devil's Kiss, Sam Balon is the Ian Malcolm analog, but not only does he never shut up, he gets more tail than a Vulpix and almost fifty more pages of screen time. I've seen Harry Potter fanfic with less subtle self-insertions.

Hell, I've seen buttplugs with less subtle self-insertions. (Mom, if you're reading this, don't ask, OK? @blewitt apologized, and we agreed to put the incident behind us months ago and never speak of it again. One of us is terrible at keeping promises.)

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With all that said, you're probably thinking I hated The Devil's Kiss.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Johnstone is one of those authors who just gets better and better the more I read of him. As I've noted in previous reviews, he and I disagree on virtually every aspect of religion and politics you could name. There's no Venn diagram where we overlap unless you count the fact we're both men, and even then I think Johnstone would vehemently disagree.

The guy's so earnest in his Old Testament beliefs, but so willing to devolve a story into outright pornography, that it creates the single most epic shitstorm of cognitive dissonance I've ever seen. Seriously, the care this guy takes in writing about incest, torture, rape, right-wing political discourse and his peculiar brand of fundamentalist Christianity has to be read to be believed. You cannot make this up, and I don't care where you lean on religion, politics, or graphic depictions of anal sex, Johnstone's wordy jabs at libruls, atheists, and pansies are hysterical. You will laugh, even though to Johnstone this was never a joke, and dammit, your soul's at stake here, Flippant Reader!

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Ordinarily I give Johnstone a bunch of grief for his inability to do character development beyond 'evil guy is evil' and 'good guy has enormous wang', but I'm going to break with type for a minute here and do the unthinkable. While Sam Balon's character is so flat it requires a training bra, there is one guy in here who I would dearly love to read an entire book about.

Unfortunately for Johnstone, that character isn't Sam Balon, Miles Lansky (patriarch of the only Jewish family in all of Folk County, but still an OK dude as far as Johnstone Balon is concerned), Jane Ann, Wade, or any of the other protagonists. No, that character is Black Wilder, the primary antagonist who gets dispatched a few pages before the conclusion.

Look, I know the idea of a suave, sophisticated, yet totally evil bad guy has been beaten into the ground after Alan Rickman put on a good show for would-be terrorists everywhere in Die Hard and Anthony Hopkins donned his prison duds to play Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter for Silence of the Lambs, but Johnstone beat them both to the punch with Black Wilder back in 1980.

Wilder is, to put it in terms my readers are most likely to understand, "Lawful Evil" in the D&D alignment scale. He's the pure representation of evil within the system. There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to be a successful agent for Satan, and Wilder knows them all. He's been around for countless years, centuries even, and though he's an immor(t)al creature of dubious lineage, and committed countless acts of sadistic perversion, he's getting bored. Human beings no longer interest him. The little game being played between Lucifer and Yahweh provides him amusement, but he's getting jaded. The two sides show no sign of backing down. What interests Wilder now is the idea of a worthy foe, someone with whom he can battle intellectually as well as physically.

He sees that in Balon. He respects that in Balon. More than once, he comments that rather than a big-ass fight, he'd love to simply sit down in a chair with Sam and engage in a long-winded, spirited, and intelligent debate about philosophy, morality, and the duality of good vs. evil. Black Wilder is, ironically, one of the most three-dimensional antagonists Johnstone ever put to paper, and he slammed it out of the stadium with his first novel. Wilder is a smarmy, slimy, vile character, but he's quite a charismatic asshole. It's probably a bad sign when a reader of your book is more interested in spending time with the bad guy than with God's own full-auto-packing champion, but damn it, I'd have read the shit out of a book where Wilder was the main man.

Even his death manages to be epic by virtue of being so extraordinarily mundane: Sam jabs a stake into his heart, while Wilder bares his own chest and lets it happen. There's no flash of light, no scent of sulfur, no explosion of screaming power... Sam just taps the stake into his heart and he's gone. Sent back to hell at Wilder's own urge, and polite to a fault the whole time. Here one second, gone the next, because that's the letter of the deal and Wilder's a guy who obeys the law (at least when it's written by one of the two Big Guys).

Black Wilder is, hands down, the most interesting character I've ever encountered in a Johnstone book.

In the meantime, there are a few sequels to get through, so I'm going to get started on The Devil's Heart next. Expect a review up here whenever I finish it.

Four screaming, impaled anuses out of five!