The Guardian by Jeffrey Konvitz

(pb; 1979: sequel to The Sentinel)

From the back cover

“Evil is raging on the twentieth floor of an apartment building on the West Side. In an open window, a hideous blind nun perpetually gazing. . .watching. A body burned beyond recognition. Then two more murders. . .strangely connected. And the discoverer, a beautiful young woman, raped. Her innocent child exposed to horror. Her husband, furious, relentlessly set on revenge. A cool, calculating, laughing priest intent on saving more lives from destruction. And so it begins. . .powerful, satanic, terrifying.”

Review

Possible spoilers in this review.

Guardian is a strange, problematic and disappointing sequel to The Sentinel. Several things mar this ambitious, unwieldy novel.

One of these glaring flaws is the expanded homophobia (initially seen with the slovenly, craven lesbians in Sentinel). While this expressed disgust is reflective of the characters and their Catholicism in both novels, Konvitz lays it on thicker than necessary in Guardian, shoe-horning that outsized hatred into the storyline, even basing one of its key twists on that disgust.

Also, there are too many subplots, red herrings and Satanic cannon fodder characters running around, making Guardian feel like an odd, badly cobbled together tale. Sentinel was a focused, organic work for the most part; Guardian is not.

Not only that, Charles Chazen, revealed to be Satan-with-limited-powers in the first book, now has the abilities of the Almighty: he can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time, whereas in Sentinel he had boundaries─he inflicted influence over and visions onto select people but he could not kill them outright. In Guardian, he can. I write this last criticism bearing in mind that Chazen/Satan has been unbound from the Sentinel’s brownstone. That said, Chazen’s sudden power blossom reads like Konvitz discarded series consistency and opted for plot convenient, Omen-like ubiquitous satanic dread.

This brings me to what I like about Guardian. I appreciate its dark atmosphere, consistent with its source novel. I like that it features some of the characters from the original book, and it shows the process through which the priests sought and psychologically groomed the next Sentinel candidate─it is clear that Konvitz wants to expand the storyline, not merely write a pro forma sequel.

Unfortunately, its flaws outweigh its bleakish joys, and Guardian comes off as a rough draft in need of serious editorial whittling. If you must read it, buy it for cheap or, better yet, borrow it from your local library if you can.