Overview
Bestselling author William Peter Blatty warms our hearts with a funny yet deeply moving nostalgic tale of memory, mystery . . . and miracles.
New York, 1941: Joey El Bueno is just a smart-aleck kid, confounding the nuns and bullies at St. Stephen’s school on East 28th Street when he first meets Jane Bent, a freckle-faced girl with red pigtails and yellow smiley-face barrettes who seems to know him better than he knows himself. A magical afternoon at the movies, watching Cary Grant in Gunga Din, is the beginning of a puzzling friendship that soon leaves Joey baffled and bewildered.
Jane is like nobody he has ever met. She comes and goes at will, nobody else seems to have heard of her, and is it true that she once levitated six feet off the ground at the refreshment counter of the old Superior movie house on Third Avenue? Joey, an avid reader of pulp magazines and comic books, is no stranger to amazing stories, but Jane is a bewitching enigma that keeps him guessing for the rest of his life—until, finally, it all makes sense.
Rich with the warmth of a bygone era, Crazy captures both the giddy craziness of youth—and the sublime possibilities of existence.
Synopsis
Bestselling author William Peter Blatty warms our hearts with a funny yet deeply moving nostalgic tale of memory, mystery . . . and miracles.
New York, 1941: Joey El Bueno is just a smart-aleck kid, confounding the nuns and bullies at St. Stephen’s school on East 28th Street when he first meets Jane Bent, a freckle-faced girl with red pigtails and yellow smiley-face barrettes who seems to know him better than he knows himself. A magical afternoon at the movies, watching Cary Grant in Gunga Din, is the beginning of a puzzling friendship that soon leaves Joey baffled and bewildered.
Jane is like nobody he has ever met. She comes and goes at will, nobody else seems to have heard of her, and is it true that she once levitated six feet off the ground at the refreshment counter of the old Superior movie house on Third Avenue? Joey, an avid reader of pulp magazines and comic books, is no stranger to amazing stories, but Jane is a bewitching enigma that keeps him guessing for the rest of his life—until, finally, it all makes sense.
Rich with the warmth of a bygone era, Crazy captures both the giddy craziness of youth—and the sublime possibilities of existence.
The Washington Post - Elizabeth Hand
It's hard to believe, but local horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy…Which makes his new novel, Crazy, a return to form. It's a sweet-natured, often hilarious…lovely, time-shifting novel, which evokes a lost New York complete with a school excursion to Coney Island and side trips to "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." It's like a classic Jean Shepherd anecdote with supernatural overtones.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Joey El Bueno recalls his childhood in WWII-era New York in this nostalgic, uncharacteristically sentimental novel from horror master Blatty (The Exorcist). In 1941, seventh-grader Joey meets the "nuttier than a truckload of filberts" Jane Bent and admits to being " perverse enough to find a little lunacy incredibly attractive." After an afternoon at the movies, Jane disappears, and Joey has trouble proving to anyone else that she ever existed. When Joey next encounters Jane, she's taken the form of a little girl who knows all about him, and Joey, understandably, questions his sanity. The mystery of Jane is eventually and unsatisfyingly explained, but it's Joey's narrative voice, not the plot, that sustains this slight, amiable book, as it dips between the good ol' days and an elderly Joey, a retired screenwriter, dishing about the movie biz--something Hollywood veteran Blatty sketches with aplomb. Cheerful though unsubstantial, this novel will please nostalgia seekers but will disappoint readers who associate Blatty with spewed pea soup. (Nov.)Kirkus Reviews
Nostalgia, sentimentality and irreverent comedy redeem a paper-thin plot in this latest from the veteran author of The Exorcist and later fiction (Dimiter, 2010, etc.).
It's a monologue performed (as if in a standup routine) by a retired octogenarian Hollywood screenwriter, Peruvian-American Joey El Bueno. While politely deflecting his Bellevue Hospital Nurse Bloor's request for his evaluation of her screenplay idea (about Nazi scientists and Hitler's preserved brain), Joey reminisces about his boyhood in New York City circa 1941, as a reluctant Catholic middle-school student, a devourer of pulp fiction and virtually every movie ever made and the accidental friend of a beautiful, eccentric older girl named Jane Bent, who attaches herself to him, becomes his self-appointed mentor and reappears mysteriously as herself and in other guises throughout Joey's youth. Though we are made privy to his adventures with Jane, none of Joey's schoolmates or buddies will even acknowledge her existence. The resulting mystery possesses and enriches Joey's imagination, as he grows regretfully away from his almost saintly "Pop," a long-widowed pushcart vendor, and into something quite like adulthood. Major problems: Jane disappears from the novel for many pages at a time; Joey/Blatty can't seem to distinguish a good gag from a groaner; and the eventually revealed identity of Joey's mystery girl/woman is a clumsy letdown that few readers will fail to see coming. Nevertheless, there are charmingly funny evocations of the 1939 New York World's Fair and a revelatory day spent at Coney Island's Luna Park. One appreciates the cameo appearance made by a Boy Scout troop leader who moonlights as a numbers runner—not to mention the schoolteacher nun who assigns an essay on the topic "Why St. Francis of Assisi Talked to Birds But Not Fish." But Blatty stacks the deck with forced emphases on the figure of Jane ("There was this aura about her, something spiritual; ethereal, really.").
Readers aren't likely to buy it. Our suggestion: Skim this one if you must, then pop some corn and watch the film version ofThe Exorcist again.
Elizabeth Hand
It's hard to believe, but local horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy…Which makes his new novel, Crazy, a return to form. It's a sweet-natured, often hilarious…lovely, time-shifting novel, which evokes a lost New York complete with a school excursion to Coney Island and side trips to "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." It's like a classic Jean Shepherd anecdote with supernatural overtones.—The Washington Post