Stephen King’s “Carrie,” which was published in 1973, also had a crazy religious fanatic parent who beats her daughter. But what bothered me most was how the story’s lewdness seems to have been written for shock value only and that seldom works. Okay, there was no PC in the 1970s hopefully we have all grown since then. Not to mention that a lesbian couple are referred to as perverts. Plus, her abusive father is written as such an insane deviant, he is not a believable character. So why didn’t this book stand the test of time? First of all, as an adult, I was pissed off that her loving boyfriend uses his hands on her. I can’t say anymore about him or it would be a spoiler. This would be the deceased wife of our heroine’s boyfriend. Is our heroine crazy or is she in hell? The book also has an unsolved murder in its plot. Yes, such a thought can still scare the Catholic schoolgirl in me. He spends his time sitting at his open window. The house is inhabited on the top floor by a reclusive blind Catholic priest, who may or may not be evil. Sounds like “Rosemary’s Baby” right? Wrong-I actually found these neighbors even spookier (possible spoiler) because the reader is not sure if they truly exist or are part of the model’s imagination.
The heroine moves into an old brownstone building and befriends the other occupants who are bizarrely eccentric. The teenage me would have found the protagonist, a beautiful-but-troubled fashion model to be a fascinating character simply because she was a model. I can see what attracted me back then to the “Sentinel.” As a native New Yorker, I enjoyed that the setting takes place in the Big Apple. As a teen in 1968, I read “Rosemary’s Baby.” And in 1973, I read “The Exorcist.” Both books better stand the test of time than this one did. I read this book the year after I graduated high school (dating myself) and I remember it scaring the bejesus out of me. My Halloween book for 2018 was written in 1974 by Jeffrey Konvitz.
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