June meetup - Black Easter by James Blish

For new attendees: Please text me at 469-449-7023 to be added to the WhatsApp group chat where we discuss future selections, find each other during meetups, etc.

1968 horror fantasy classic by James Blish. 172 pages.

Black Easter is a horror-fantasy novel by James Blish about an arms dealer who hires a black magician to unleash demons on Earth for one day, leading to chaos and a battle between Heaven and Hell, with a major twist at the end. It's known for blending horror, sci-fi, and fantasy...The story features a plot to assassinate a governor and a ritual to open Hell's gates, drawing on themes from Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost.

It is one book of a group of novels by Blish called collectively After Such Knowledge, from T.S. Eliot's line "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"

"Each one of [these novels]," Blish wrote, "was a dramatization, in its own terms of one of the oldest problems of philosophy: Is the desire for secular knowledge, let alone the acquisition and use of it, a misuse of the mind, and perhaps even actively evil?"

Blish wrote a short sequel to Black Easter called The Day After Judgment. They are often published together under the title The Devil's Day. For this book club, reading the sequel is optional.

Free PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x0BglDJsdFkkIwC4Ti1TAgKYX5tlmVol/view?usp=drivesdk