Readers unfamiliar with the novella "Midnight Mass" (1990) and the novel Midnight Mass (2004) may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.
A priest and a rabbi walk into a church together.
For a moment he was disoriented, like someone peering out the window of a city apartment and seeing the rolling hills of a Kansas farm. This could not be the interior of St Anthony's.
In the flickering light of hundreds of sacramental candles he saw that the walls were bare, stripped of all their ornaments, of the plaques for the stations of the cross; the dark wood along the wall was scarred and gouged wherever there had been anything remotely resembling a cross. The floor too was mostly bare, the pews ripped from their neat rows and hacked to pieces, their splintered remains piled high at the rear under the choir balcony.
And the giant crucifix that had dominated the space behind the altar – only a portion of it remained. The cross-pieces on each side had been sawed off and so now an armless, life-size Christ hung upside down against the rear wall of the sanctuary.
Joe took in all that in a flash, then his attention was drawn to the unholy congregation that peopled St Anthony's this night. The collaborators – the Vichy humans, as Zev called them – made up the periphery of the group. They looked like normal, everyday people but each was wearing a crescent moon earring.
But the others, the group gathered in the sanctuary – Joe felt his hackles rise at the sight of them. They surrounded the altar in a tight knot. Their pale, bestial faces, bereft of the slightest trace of human warmth, compassion, or decency, were turned upward. His gorge rose when he saw the object of their rapt attention.
A naked teenage boy – his hands tied behind his back, was suspended over the altar by his ankles. He was sobbing and choking, his eyes wide and vacant with shock, his mind all but gone. The skin had been flayed from his forehead – apparently the Vichy had found an expedient solution to the cross tattoo – and blood ran in a slow stream down his abdomen and chest from his freshly truncated genitals. And beside him, standing atop the altar, a bloody-mouthed creature dressed in a long cassock. Joe recognized the thin shoulders, the graying hair trailing from the balding crown, but was shocked at the crimson vulpine grin he flashed to the things clustered below him.
"Now," said the creature in a lightly accented voice Joe had heard hundreds of times from St Anthony's pulpit.
Father Alberto Palmeri.
And from the group a hand reached up with a straight razor and drew it across the boy's throat. As the blood flowed down over his face, those below squeezed and struggled forward like hatchling vultures to catch the falling drops and scarlet trickles in their open mouths.
Joe fell away from the window and vomited. He felt Zev grab his arm and lead him away. He was vaguely aware of crossing the street and heading toward the ruined legal office.
• • •
Stories about humanity "under the fang" don't come much bloodier, more sanctimonious, and populated with more caricatues than F. Paul Wilson's 1990 novella "Midnight Mass."
Father Joseph Cahill, a handsome and winning young priest, has been framed-up as a pedophile and exiled from his parish before the action begins. He is found in the basement Morton's Liquors and recalled to life by an old theological sparring partner, Rabbi Zev Wolpin. Zev is a Jackie Mason Jew stereotype from central casting. For Wilson he only exists to maneuver Fadda Joe into inspiring a mass fightback against the vampire occupation.
Wilson later shaped this novella and other material into the 2004 paste-up novel Midnight Mass. That novel, with alternating situations for a variety of characters as they converge and unite to fight the vampires, is very good.
So, all proportions guarded, is "Midnight Mass." I have read enough Wilson to know his use of caricature for rabbis and whiskey priests and colorful parishioners is not aimed maliciously. It's mass market fiction, and of a very high order.
Jay
16 July 2022
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The Mammoth Book of Vampires ([1992] 2004 edition) edited by Stephen Jones
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