THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY by Ramona Stewart. 246 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.
This is a second-generation offspring of Rosemary's Baby, almost certain to make a bundle. Though the author is shown on the jacket sparring with a really splendid-looking stripey cat, her literary device is not witchcraft but the possession of a vapid, drugged human body by an espíritus perturbados, in this case the troubled spirit of a murdered Puerto Rican boy armed with a switchblade.
Everything else is in place, however. The upper-middle-class setting; the Upper East Side New York matron with a standard liberal distrust of superstition and black magic, comfily surrounded by a credibility quotient of teen-age children, a lately divorced husband, maid problems, and a dog that never barks at intruders and is afraid of snow. Full awareness of what the lady is up against is naturally slow to set in, even when she finds herself in the midst of an exorcism ceremony in Spanish Harlem.
The victim is her brother, after all. Besides, the family psychiatrist keeps nattering on about fantasies of rage and guilt, parapsychic phenomena and escape into a new personality. Suspense is easy to achieve, but effective escape from the plot proves more difficult. There are moments, though, when the book stirs some slight fear of the existence of evil—real achievement in an age still blinkered by faith that the universe is uniquely the province of reason.
· T.F.