By JEFFREY KONVITZ (Simon & Schuster; 1974)

This 1974 horror novel is filled with surprises.  Foremost among those surprises are that 1). it was a best seller in its day, 2). it inspired a sequel, 1979’s THE GUARDIAN (and also a high profile 1977 movie from director Michael Winner), and 3). it’s now considered a classic among horror buffs.  Trust me: THE SENTINEL is no classic.

The subject is a creepy Manhattan brownstone, into which Allison Parker, an emotionally disturbed model, unwisely settles.  Weirdness is evident from the start, with Allison’s fellow tenants proving quite strange indeed.  The opening pages seem very ROSEMARY’S BABY-ish, but the narrative switches genres as it becomes clear that an organized conspiracy is afoot that would appear to be dedicated to driving the already on-edge Allison completely insane; the tenants she interacted with, after all, don’t actually exist.

But then the narrative undergoes yet undergo another shift as it turns out that the brownstone where all this takes place is in fact the portal to Hell.  Allison, it seems, is the appointed sentinel (which, according to the online dictionary definition, means “One that keeps guard, a sentry”) tasked with keeping the forces of darkness at bay.

Very much a product of its time, THE SENTINEL all-but flaunts its trashiness.  The prose is trite and simplistic, and the characterizations quite perfunctory, most notably that of Allison, who perfectly embodies Marvin Kaye’s description of a “sweet-young thing-brutalized-by-the-boogeyman” (made about ROSEMARY’S BABY, but equally applicable here).  Luckily she’s got a hunky boyfriend to help her along, and smack her around when she gets too hysterical (this was the seventies, after all), as well as a tough male cop whose investigation into the many suspicious activities surrounding the brownstone provides an overly involved (and, once again, very seventies) subplot.

The latter character is one of many disappointingly conventional elements in a novel whose charm is in its highly unconventional genre-hopping.  That, in fact, is THE SENTINEL’S only interesting feature, as it’s otherwise a silly and derivative horror-fest that, to add further insult, is never very scary.