Dimiter by William Peter Blatty
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Blatty has enthralled us before with tales of spooks, demons and religion gone awry. He filled The Exorcist and Legion with all manner of phantasms, inspiring fear of the unseen and unknown that might lurk just beyond our line of sight or comprehension.
Unfortunate that he didn’t manage that feat this time. Dimiter suffers from entirely too much ephemera, casting great clouds of smoke up for us to discover there’s barely a campfire behind it.
The book just felt like kind of a mess. There were interesting ideas, and several memorable scenes, but they are strung together nonsensically and seemingly without the purpose of an over-arcing plot. Only one character seems to have any reality or density to him, and even he is yanked around by the plot-chain quite frequently, especially in the epilogue. There didn’t seem to be much of a point to any of it, and there felt like precisely zero payoff by the end.
One saving grace was the prose; though he occasionally delves into confusing POV shifts and bizarre metaphors, overall the writing was well done, almost being decent enough to make you forget there wasn’t a story or a point to it. But realistically, I don’t think I can really recommend this book to anyone unless they’re a devout Blatty worshipper or desperate for something to pull through over a weekend.
Insomniac Nightmares 
0 Responses to “Goodreads Review: Dimiter”