THE BEDEVILED
Rare first edition of Cullinan's great American horror novel of familial corruption, self-delusion, and the sins of an undead national history.
Near fine in near fine jacket.
Price: $1,500.00
THE BEDEVILED
"[A] blood-freezing tale." — The New York Times
Like Cullinan's other two great classics, THE BEGUILED and THE BESIEGED, THE BEDEVILED is concerned with Catholicism, the American Civil War, and the voices of women; unlike them, it is an unambiguous horror novel set in the modern day. Cullinan uses all the familiar building blocks of genre and era — Satanic masses, justified suspicion of a paternalistic medical establishment, seductive historical hauntings, a peculiarly '70s conception of mental breakdown and psychosis — to construct something ultimately more sinister than Blatty's EXORCIST and deeper than Levin's ROSEMARY'S BABY; in THE BEDEVILED, a crisis of faith is only the first and most elementary horror, with feminism an implicit and necessary question but no answer to great evil. Constantly rediscovered (Valancourt issued it as part of its "Classics" series in 2019 and Centipede reprinted it as a limited edition the following year) but never sufficiently esteemed, THE BEDEVILED is best appraised by Leslie Fiedler, writing (in 1960) without the benefit of having read it: "It is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of [America's] best writers: the gothic symbolically understood, its machinery and décor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social, and metaphysical."
Read more: Tina Jordan, "50 States, 50 Scares," The New York Times; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel.
The Object
First printing. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, (1978). 8.5'' x 5.5''. Original black cloth with metallic red-lettered spine. In original unclipped ($10.00) dust jacket by Lydia Rosier. 285, [1] pages. Corners lightly bumped. Previous owner's emboss to front free endpaper. Minor edgewear to jacket. Overall, bright and sound.
The Fine Print
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