By ANNE HÉBERT (PaperJacks; 1975)

Quebec’s late Anne Hébert (1916-2000) was, like many Canadian authors, obsessed with D-words—darkness, desolation and death, to be exact.  Her novels are held in extremely high esteem by the Quebecois literati, yet her choice of subject matter included a vampire (HÉLOÏSE), a murderous love triangle (KAMOURASKA), small town corruption (IN THE SHADOW OF THE WIND) and, in the case of the Governor General award-winning book under discussion, Satanism.

CHILDREN OF THE BLACK SABBATH can, in fact, be called a horror novel (having been included in THE TWILIGHT ZONE magazine’s “Fantasy Five-Foot Bookshelf” ranking) of the “nunsploitation” variety.  Featured is nearly everything one could possibly expect from this sort of fare: demonic possession, torture, madness, shape shifting, levitation, black masses, perverted sex, blasphemous language, a mutant birth, and (of course) an exorcism.

It’s also a heartfelt (albeit perverse) love story between a nun and her long-lost brother, with whom she shared an incestuous relationship.  It seems that said nun, Sister Julie of the Trinity, is possessed by Satan, who speaks to her in the form of “visions” that are actually flashbacks to her decidedly unorthodox childhood, in which she and her sibling lover grew up in the shadow of a perverse couple living in a mountain shanty. These nutters practiced all sorts of occult rituals in which they involved the residents of the village below, until people inevitably grew fed up and burned down the shanty, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.

Back in the present (the year 1944) Sister Julie’s visions begin to infect her entire convent, leading to mass hysteria.  Sounds pretty randy, but the book, expertly translated by Carol Dunlop-Hébert, is anything but an exploitation quickie. It’s actually, in the manner of most of Hébert’s other novels, a poetic rumination on faith and ritual in the silence, or absence, of a higher power.  I realize I’m making the book sound obnoxiously highbrow, and indeed it is at times, but for the most part CHILDREN OF THE BLACK SABBATH finds a comfortable middle ground between the literary and the creepy-crawly, and does so in under 200 pages.