Satan’s Master (Joseph Nazel, 1974)

 

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.