CrazyA Novel

Crazy: A Novel
by William Peter Blatty

William Peter Blatty

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, Stephen Hoye
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Sassy humor and gentle nostalgia is the surprisingly effective combination employed by Blatty, master of the horror genre and the author of The Exorcist, in this fond look back at 1940s- era New York. As 80-year-old Joey El Bueno begins his memoirs while a patient at Bellevue Hospital, he introduces his adolescent alter ego, a wisecracking Peruvian-Irish kid with an affinity for driving the staff at St. Stephen’s Grammar School batty. But the nuns aren’t the only ones going a little crazy; you see, lately Joey has struck up a friendship with a girl no one else seems to have seen or heard of, and Joey himself seems to know about things before they have happened. As readers attempt to puzzle out whether Joey has a fractured psyche or has broken through the time-space continuum, they will be treated to an entertaining romp through the Lower East Side conducted by an inimitable tour guide. --Margaret Flanagan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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“A superbly executed blend of  tenderness and satire that comes to a powerful and emotional crescendo, Crazy is a marvelous work of fiction that cements Blatty’s place of honor among great American authors.” -- Fears Magazine

From the Washington Post

Reviewed by novelist Elizabeth Hand

It's hard to believe, but local horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy. In addition to his comic novels, he worked with Blake Edwards on several films, including "A Shot in the Dark," the second Inspector Clouseau movie; he loved P.G. Wodehouse; and he was even compared to S.J. Perelman. All this came before those looming steps in Georgetown forever linked Blatty with his best-known work, "The Exorcist" (1971).

Which makes his new novel, "Crazy," a return to form. It's a sweet-natured, often hilarious tale cast as the memoirs of an 82-year-old former screenwriter named Joey El Bueno. Joey's writing from a 10th-floor room at Bellevue Hospital, where the usually suspicious Nurse Bloor doesn't raise an eyebrow at his laptop because "she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type."

Joey is the son of an Irish beauty who died giving birth to him and an impoverished Peruvian immigrant who made his living pushing a hot dog cart. Joey's memoir takes us back to the year he was a seventh-grader at St. Stephen's, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in 1941. That's where he first meets Jane Bent, a street-smart, foul-mouthed transfer student from Our Lady of Sorrows. At first, Joey finds her "nuttier than a truckload of filberts," but that changes when Jane flashes a $5 bill and suggests an afternoon at the movies.

Many hours and three screenings of "Gunga Din" later, the two seem to have become an inseparable pair. Then they part, and Joey never sees her again. Not that Jane, anyway.

I won't say more lest I spoil the pleasures of this lovely, time-shifting novel, which evokes a lost New York complete with a school excursion to Coney Island and side trips to "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." It's like a classic Jean Shepherd anecdote with supernatural overtones. Blatty also cites Ray Bradbury and Robert Nathan as influences, and "Crazy" more than once invokes Kurt Vonnegut. Joey's memoir favors run-on sentences with a comedic payoff: "There was a breeze and these jillions of gulls all circling and squawking forlornly but with great agitation and high excitement as if they were in factions that were blaming one another for the loss of some unspoiled world, some paradise where every automobile was a convertible and where hats and awnings did not exist."

Blatty has always been upfront about his Catholic faith. The opening of "The Exorcist" evokes "Lucifer upward-groping back to his God," and Crazy's poignant final pages make clear that, rather than an exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a reminder of Saint Paul's command, "While we have time, let us do good." Or, as Joey puts it, "What would Kurt Vonnegut do?"

Hand's most recent novel is "Illyria."

"Crazy is terrific! A wonderful novel: funny, touching and SO full of love!"--Julie Andrews

“Crazy left me with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye.”-- Dread Central

“With its wildly creative and humorous scenarios, Crazy is wise and witty, funny and sad. It’s a story of good and evil, of second chances, of coming to peace at the end of the road and welcoming the unknown.” --bookreporter.com

“There’s a certain vaudevillian flair to all of Blatty’s  work, but it’s the sort of vaudeville that powers the absurdist despair of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot; one-liners and gags are just another way to deal with the inevitability of death. The difference is, there’s a core of faith and optimism at the heart of Blatty’s writing. Horror exists, as do evil and the monsters who perpetrate it, but there’s also God in his heaven, purpose, and at least the possibility of justice.” –-A.V. CLUB

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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