They say that you shouldn't judge a book by the cover, and I try not to, but the cover is still a lot. The paperback cover of Grady Hendrix's horror novel, My Best Friend's Exorcism, took hold of my eyes and refused to let go. A throwback to the Drew Struzan movie posters and pulp horror book covers of the 80's. The tease of a teenage 80's nostalgia trip with a "Satanic Panic" edge excited me like few other things do. So in I went, headfirst, not knowing what horrors awaited me, and boy, what glorious horrors they were. As one character in the book, Father Morgan, says, "You can't judge a book by its cover, but the cover does give you a pretty good indication of what's inside" (183).
The pulse of nostalgia for 80's pop culture can be felt through every page, but it's dealt with far more grace than Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. For starters, Ready Player One felt like a Buzzfeed listicle for Big Bang Theory fans in prose form. Indeed, the over-stuffing of pop culture references came off as shallow, bloated, and narcissistic. Not so here. My Best Friend's Exorcist isn't interested in overloading your senses with every film, show, and video game known to man. It instead takes the Stranger Things route in setting its focus on a few popular items and giving them a sentimental connection to the characters.
This is set up early on with Steven Spielberg's ET, which is the theme of Abby's childhood birthday party at the skating ring. No one in her class shows up because they'd rather go to Margaret's party with horseback riding. The only kid to come over is the sheltered Gretchen, clearly pushed into it by her parents. Gretchen knows nothing about ET, thinking it stands for "extra terrible" and has never used roller skates. Abby introduces her to the ways of the world, often to the annoyance of Gretchen's religiously conservative parents. One such incident occurs when the two are caught singing to Madonna's "Like A Virgin", dressed with "dozens of crosses around their necks" and "painting their lips bright coral" (35). Gretchen's parents go into such a fury that their friendship breaks, but being children, they inevitably reconcile. They have other friends, though, like the rich popular girl Margaret, and the quiet but intelligent one Glee. Many of the school parts read to me like a raunchier version of Tales From A Fourth Grade Nothing. It's filled with all the warm messages young people need to hear, but doesn't shy away from how disgusting life can get. It's John Hughes by way of Chuck Palahniuk. There's an episode when a student loses their retainer in the garbage and Gretchen and Abby go rifling through many garbage bags, in minute detail, to retrieve it. Heartfelt, but nauseating.
Gretchen's demonic possession seems to come out of nowhere. All we know is that Gretchen goes running naked through the woods after an acid trip, and comes out of an old cabin worse for wear. We hear rumors of a Satanic cult that supposedly chopped a girl up before. Abby may or may not have seen a man in the cabin window. It's suggested that Margaret's playboy boyfriend, Wallace Stoney, might have raped Gretchen, or that he father mistreated her a few too many times, but we never know for certain. By the end of the novel, the how and why of Gretchen's possession, aren't as important as the impact it leaves on everyone around her. There's a seminal moment in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, where the young Father Karras asks the older Father Merrick why Satan would chose to harass an innocent little girl. Merrick replies that by making a little girl the object of such disgust and revulsion, he makes believers question how God could still bear to love human beings. Thus throwing into doubt Christ's whole mission. Gretchen's ordeal is of a slightly different nature. She throws doubt into everyone's love for her. Many of the worst things in the novel occur to those around her.
When Gretchen writes fake love letters to Glee from Father Morgan, Glee confesses her mutual love to the befuddled priest. When he responds that he has no idea what she is talking about, she is driven to attempting suicide by leaping off the bell tower. Gretchen gets Margaret to take milkshakes with tapeworm eggs in effort lose weight. The result may be, by far, the most horrifying scene the novel. Margaret lies bed-ridden, looking more corpse than girl, when, "It slid over the root of Margaret's tongue, and then Margaret gave three explosive, throat-clearing coughs, each one pushing it out farther. It was sticky, gelatinous, and alive--a blind white worm, thick as a garden hose, and it was hauling itself out of Margaret's stomach with single-minded intent" (252). What happens here isn't even supernatural, but the fact that it's plausible makes it all the more skin-scrawling. It must needs be stressed that these and others acts have a secondary, reputational effect. Rumors spread quickly in their town, and even quicker in high school. Glee, Margaret, and especially Gretchen, won't be looked at by their classmates the same way again. Even if the demon is exorcised, the damage he leaves behind won't be so swiftly erased.
Hendrix indicts the whole town as complicit in spreading the demon's evil. This is on particular display with Gretchen's parents, who want to keep her locked away from all the world's temptations. Instead of trying to understand her, or the friend who knows her best, they blame drugs and sex for their daughter's corruption. The adults care about their reputations about as strongly as the teenagers do. Anything wrong with their children, anything damaging, is explained away, dismissed, or ignored. Father Morgan tells Abby the story when Jesus exorcised the Gadarene madman, and is expelled by the town for it. Some people need a boogeyman to put all their sins on, to avoid confronting their own, "The people in the village needed the Gadarene madman to be sick. That way they could project all their problems onto him. They blamed him for everything: too much rain, too little rain, their kids staying out past curfew, cows dying. As long as he was sick, they could point to someone who wasn't them and say, 'That's his fault. He's possessed by Satan.' And when Jesus cured him, they didn't know what to do. They were at a loss" (185). While Morgan says this to try and convince Abby that Gretchen isn't possessed, she seems to already grasp the town's underlying hypocrisy in how they treat Gretchen:
"Turning eighteen doesn't determine when you become an adult in Charleston; neither does registering to vote, graduating from high school, or getting your driver's license. In Charleston, the day you become an adult is the day you learn to ignore your neighbor's drunk driving and focus instead on whether he submitted a paint-color change proposal to the Board of Architectural Review. The day you become an adult is the day you learn that in Charleston, the worse something is, the less attention it recieves.
"At Albermarle, everyone was suddenly being very adult about Gretchen" (177-178).
The friendship between Gretchen and Abby is at the heart of this novel, and what a heart it has. The love that these two share is the purest form of philia, more intimate than that of many romances. This one aspect where My Best Friend's Exorcist surpasses William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. While that novel was certainly a thrilling struggle of one man's faith, the reader's sympathy for Reagan never reached anything personal. However, when we see Gretchen transform into a monster, when we watch her struggle and suffer, it breaks our hearts as much as it does Abby's. Gretchen is more than just an innocent little girl, she's our friend. Thus, the trial becomes more a challenge to Abby's faith in their friendship than her faith in a God. Brother Lemon tells Abby that, "An exorcism tests us. It asks, 'How strong is your faith? How deep is your belief?' The exorcist must be willing to lose everything---all dignity, all safety, all illusions---everything is burned away in the fire of the exorcism, and what's left is the core of who you are" (288). This is exactly what happens during the climax, but the resolution has a unique twist.
On her last legs, alone with the demon, Abby picks up Brother Lemon's holy book and begins recite the famous words, like, "The power of Christ compels you." We sort of expect things to go on as they did in Blatty and Friedkin's Exorcist, with God casting out Satan, but no such thing occurs because it would be insincere. Abby has not been especially religious throughout the book, so for her to suddenly come to Jesus now would ring false. So instead, she uses prays in the name of the things that meant the most to her, her memories: "By the mysteries and the power of Good Dog Max, and E.T. the Extra-terrible, and Geraldine Ferraro the first lady vice president ever, by the Eye of the Tiger, the Love Cry of the Koala Bear, by the passion and redemption of Bad Mama Jama, who will always have supper in the oven" (311). In any other book, using pop culture nostalgia to defeat the devil would come off as corny and cheap, but here, we are moved. Why? Because we were there with Abby when these memories were made. We know what Madonna, Phil Collins, and the Go-Gos mean to Abby and Gretchen. Those are the things that only they can share, and no demon can snatch those moments away.
By the end of the novel, many ups and downs occur over the course of Abby and Gretchen's lives, their friendship even ebbs and flows, but it never does it end. All they have is each other. It's all they've ever had, and it's all they've ever needed. Abby was the only one who stayed with Gretchen while she suffered possession. When Abby is on her deathbed, Gretchen is the only one sitting warmly beside her. Many hope for such friendship, but few are ever lucky enough to find it.
Bibliography
Hendrix, Grady. My Best Friend's Exorcist. Quirk Books: United States of America, 2016. 35, 177-178, 183, 185, 252, 288.
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