The
history of this book hasn't been well documented, but a bit of detective work
indicates it was originally published in 1974 under the title 'The Black
Exorcist', before being re-issued in 1983 as Satan's Master. The reasons for
the re-titling are unknown, but the smart money would be on Warner Brothers
throwing a cease and desist in the direction of its publisher Holloway House.
Keeping in mind that around the same time Warners got the blaxploitation movie
'Abby' pulled from theatres due to its similarities to The Exorcist. If Abby
incensed them, it's hard to believe they'd let calling a book The Black
Exorcist fly. Whilst Abby has never ‘officially’ resurfaced, a title change it
seems was all that it took for The Black Exorcist to rise from the ashes. In
the Satan's Master edition of the book, Holloway House added to the confusion
by listing The Black Exorcist amongst the other books by the same author,
Joseph Nazel, indicating that they were two separate entities. Having read
Satan's Master and seen the back cover synopsis of The Black Exorcist though,
the identical plots and character names leave no doubt that Satan's Master and
The Black Exorcist are one in the same.
The original title of the book leads you to expect
this to be just another crass example of someone taking a white concept,
colouring the main characters black and throwing a few Afros into the mix. An accusation that's often leveled at the
lesser end of blaxploitation cinema. Go in with low expectations then and
Satan's Master will sucker punch you, but in a good way. When a singer does a standout
or distinct cover version of somebody else's song, people throw out the
compliment "he made that song his own" and I think with Satan's
Master, Joseph Nazel makes The Exorcist his own. Nazel takes the devil
possession theme, and uses it as a commentary on race relations,
African-Americans' relationship with Christianity, slavery, the Manson
Murders....there is a heck of allot to unpack here. In the pages of Satan's
Master, Nazel paints himself as a supporter of Martin Luther King's idea of
Nonviolent resistance, and being disturbed by the younger generation turning
away from King's ideals and Christianity itself, in favour of a more militant
approach to black activism in America. Concerns that Nazel addresses in Satan's
Master using the horror genre.
Satan's Master initially pits Christian preacher
Reverend Moses Johnson against the devil worshipping, voodoo practicing
Barbados Sam. Two contrasting forces battling for the soul of the black
community, Johnson is old, frail and concerned with the well being of his
fellow man. Barbados Sam is young, flamboyant and a total scam artist ‘a man
who had done little in his life but prey off the weakest of his fellow man'.
Sam uses anti-white sentiment to lure young black men away from "the
honkie god" and onto the Satanic path. Sam's 'The Cult of the Damned'
holds sex and violence fuelled orgies that climax in ritualistic sacrifices and
heart extractions. Under the pretext of black militancy, Sam also orders his
followers to go out and slay whitey. Behind his Baron Samedi act however, Sam
believes in nothing that he preaches, and is using anti-white racism to feather
his own nest, irregardless of the chaos and racial division he leaves in his
wake. It's near impossible to read Satan's Master and not wonder what Nazel,
who died in 2006, would have made of the Black Lives Matter movement. In that
respect Satan's Master is a warning from history that we all should have paid
attention to.
The early unmasking of the Satanic cult as money
grabbing fraudsters might lead to concerns that Satan's Master is a crime novel
in horror genre clothing. Fortunately Nazel soon pacifies such fears when one
of Barbados Sam's satanic gatherings goes awry. Resulting in Satan possessing
Sam's girlfriend Shelia, transforming her from Sam's co-conspirator into a Satanic
seductress who is hell bent on racial unrest.
Satan's Master might occasionally borrow from the
Exorcist playbook- we do get self-shaking beds and projectile vomiting - but
Nazel has his own bag of tricks. Among them… serpent attacks, an army of frogs,
a victim of the cult returning to life as a zombie, and helter-skelter like
scenes of racist blacks slaughtering rich white people in their beds. In the
long run Satan's Master diverts more from The Exorcist than it steals from it.
Although, if my suspicions as to why the book got re-titled are correct, Warner
Bros might disagree.
Nazel personalizes The Exorcist's crisis of faith
theme into explicitly African-American terms. Satan's aim in the book being to
plant doubt in African-American minds that there is a place for them in heaven
"we black people, all of us, have been marked for death by the white
god". As well as have them question why God allows racial injustices to
continue on a daily basis. This is mainly addressed through the character of
the Reverend Roger Lee, an assistant pastor, who is on a guilt trip over his
mother's death and their unresolved differences. A characteristic which
instantly makes you think that Lee with be the book's Father Karras figure, yet
on reflection I wonder if Nazel looked a bit closer to home for inspiration.
One of the most famous books to come out of Holloway House was 'Pimp: The Story
of my Life' by Iceberg Slim, in which a source of torment for Slim was that his
devout mother died without seeing him turn his life around. His mother's death
being a motivating factor in Slim leaving pimping and drug use behind him. Rev.
Lee's back-story is Iceberg Slim verbatim, Lee having been a pimp and therefore
a source of shame to his religious mother. Lee's mother issues, and the ever
present temptation to go back to his previous life, are the chinks in the armor
that Satan uses against Lee. First appearing in the form of his mother, and
then as sexy, evil Sheila, who encourages him to ditch his congregation and get
another stable of bitches together "Come on, Sweet Sugar Man. I knows you
wants some of this good, sweet stuff that I gots for you. Come on and get it
while it's hot...it sho' will do you some good".
Unfortunately, Satan's Master feels like a 170
page book trapped in the out of shape body of a 224 page one. It does flat line
slightly around the middle, where Nazel develops a habit of reiterating what we
already know. After we bear witness to the first Satanic sacrifice, and are
aware of how and why the victim, Jim, died, we then get a scene where a coroner
and a detective speculate to as how and why Jim victim died, followed by a
scene in which Jim's neighbours speculate as to how and why their neighbour
died, followed by a scene in which Lee comforts Jim's mother, and they
speculate as to how and why Jim died. Satan's Master is a book where the
characters always seem several steps behind the reader, with Nazel leaving us
just standing around waiting for them to catch up. There can be little doubt
however that Nazel was engaged in the religious themes of Satan's Master on a
deep level. In the only article about Nazel that I'm aware of 'Not just an ordinary
Joe' by fellow Holloway House scribe Emory Holmes II, it's
mentioned that Nazel had at one stage trained for the priesthood, only to end
up being 'politely asked to leave'. A revelation that adds much clarity to Satan's
Master. There are obvious elements of Nazel in Rev. Lee, an intensely religious
man who nevertheless seeks many spiritual answers and is unafraid of butting
heads with church officialdom. Nazel isn't entirely uncritical of organized
religion, the Rev. Lee at one point taking a shot at religious leaders
"lost in the splendor of their own positions, confident they had already
earned their rewards, (they) had become fat and lazy and often too
self-righteous". Overall though, Satan's Master is a dire warning about
the dangers of the black community abandoning Christianity, the final words of
the book being 'there was no other way'.
On account of a tendency towards repetition, and
the high wall of Nazel's religious fundamentalism, this is the point in Satan’s
Master where it will likely shed a few readers. Particularly those drawn to it
by the original Black Exorcist title and expecting a silly, campy spectacle.
Still for those willing to stay the course, and scale that high wall, Satan's
Master has its pulpy rewards. Once you reach the point in the book where an
elderly grandmother- thought to be possessed by Satan- is thrown out of a three
story window, we're home free and into a lively third act that redeems the
entire book. Another highlight from the tail end of Satan's Master being a
sleazy stab at S&M as the Rev. Lee trashes a naked Shelia with his belt
after she urinates on his bible. Lee's background as a pimp- who can dish it
out to the hoes- coming in handy for a change. Although I suspect that Iceberg
Slim would have reached for a wire coat hanger, rather than a belt, to keep a
blaspheming she-devil in line.
Despite Nazel's books coming to prominence during
the blaxploitation era, on closer inspection, his seems to be a dissenting
voice in that crowd. Judging by Satan's Master, and several of his other books,
there was no love lost between Nazel and the more violent aspects of black
activism that blaxploitation was largely cheering on back then. In 1975's
Killer Cop, a black police officer comes into conflict with an unruly black
militant group, while 1987's Street War concerns 'a gang of fanatical black
militants, left over from the Sixties, who are trying to start a war'. This in
mind it's entirely fitting that Nazel's only connection with blaxploitation was
writing the novelization of Lee Frost's The Black Gestapo (1975). A film so
perfectly in touch with Nazel's cynical take on black militant groups, that by
rights it feels like it should have been an adaptation of a pre-existing Nazel
book.
Nor does Nazel demonize all white people here, in
a way that blaxploitation had a tendency to do. A white coroner and a white
detective both assist Rev. Lee to a certain degree, while the finale involves
Lee trying to save an innocent white child from the Satanic cult. Still, Nazel's
decision to leave these characters unnamed does seem his way of emphasizing
their unimportance in the grand scheme of things. Nazel's primary concern here
being conflicts played out within the black community itself. Leaving these
characters unnamed does feel a little absurd at times though, especially the
white detective. Given the regular interactions between him and Lee, you'd
think the Reverend would at one point ask the guy what his name is.
The only two white characters Nazel does give
names to, Stacey and Pete, are vile, racist and possibly gay, Italian Mafiosi,
who are pulling Barbados Sam's strings. In Nazel's eyes, white characters can
contribute to the black community's problems, but are rarely able to be of much
help. Adding to a sense of a community cast adrift and left to fight its own
battles.
Offering a more even handed approach than
blaxploitation. Being a cop, be you black or white, doesn't automatically make
you a bad guy in Nazel's world. While in Satan's Master a blind hatred for
white people is seen as a negative characteristic, one which allows young,
impressionable black men to be manipulated by both the Mafia and Satan.
One of the many endearing facts about Nazel is
that he seemingly stuck with the less than ethical sounding Holloway House for
so long, not out of a sense of loyalty to the company itself, but their core
audience. Holloway House, for all their sins, did offer a chance for authentic
black voices like Nazel and Iceberg Slim to be heard by a blue collar, inner
city audience without compromise. Nazel's dialogue in Satan's Master being
inseparable from the culture it came from "if she tol' you not to mess
aroun' with them dark doin's , then she tol' you right...that voodoo ain't
nothin' to fool wit'". The terrible irony is that those Holloway House
titles from the 1970s and 80s now command prohibitively expensive prices,
almost certainly taking them out of reach of the very people Nazel was writing
for. A Nazel re-print program should be a cultural priority.
Satan's Master stands as a combination of social
consciousness and the horror genre, where for a change those two elements
compliment, rather than shout over each other. Nazel's religious fundamentalism
does occasionally feel like the author is smacking you around the face with the
family bible, but his righteous anger at an unjust world and hope for a better
tomorrow is something that people from all walks of life can't fail to be moved
by. Joseph Nazel was a man with allot to say, and allot that is still worth
hearing.
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