Dimiter is written by William Peter Blatty.  The dust jacket blares “author of The Exorcist“.  Don’t pick up Dimiter if you’re looking for something along the lines of Blatty’s horror classic.  USA Today called Dimiter a “tightly wound, suspenseful novel”.  I found it to be neither tightly wound, nor suspenseful.  That’s not bad, though.  It’s different, and it’s interesting, and I couldn’t put it down.

In Albania, in 1973, a mysterious man is taken captive by the authorities.  He was found by a squadlooking for a murderer.  This mystery man was apprehended in the home of a blind man.  The blind man just simply told police the mystery man didn’t belong there.  The elderly blind man said the stranger called himself Selca Decani; the blind man knew Decani, and knew he had been dead for several years.

The local authorities, headed by a man named Vlora, interrogate the mystery prisoner who called himself Decani.  The prisoner won’t talk, though, won’t utter a sound.  The time for asking questions is soon over, and the interrogation techniques give way to torture.  Very sadistic, inhumantorture.  Among the things Vlora orders is to have the prisoner’s fingernails pulled out.  Still, the prisoner doesn’t talk, doesn’t give any information.  He’s a steel trap that is leaking no secrets.

The man’s silence disturbs Vlora, and he soon believes the man to be a secret agent, one referred to as “the agent from Hell.”  Before he can substantiate any of this, the prisoner escapes, killing Vlora’s son (one of the torturers) in the process.

Jump ahead to Jerusalem, a year later.  There are some strange happening at a Hadassah Hospital.  A nurse, Samia Maroon, has seen a woman she believes to be a spectre, and she has reported a man dressed as a clown entertaining the kids in the children’s ward at three in the morning; the clown was gone when she went to investigate it further.  One of the children has since been cured of a fatal cancer.  She has reported all this to her friend and colleague, neurologist Moses Mayo.  Mayo is skeptical when it comes to the supernatural; he wants to believe, but can’t.  He also has his hands full with mysterious deaths throughout the hospital.

Also, there is detective Peter Meral, who is investigating the body of a man found at the Tomb of Christ.  No one knows how the body got there, or who could have placed it there.  It is a mystery man they can’t identify, but who had several passports in his possession.  One of which identifies the body disfigured remains as Selca Decani.

Somehow all this ties into the secret agent known as Dimiter.  And William Peter Blatty ties it all together in tidy fashion.

Like I said, I didn’t find Dimiter to be very suspenseful, but it is a compulsive read.  The mystery is intriguing, but Blatty’s aim is further than his reach.  There are crises of faith, and discussion of religious wonder, but nothing is really very deep.  The subplot of the nurse is all but dropped, and though there are parallels drawn between Dimiter and Jesus Christ, it only skims the surface, and it too ends up being all but forgotten.  I think there was more to this story that was just edited out, or else Blatty just didn’t write it.  Either way, it’s a shame.

This is a slim, minor work from a master.  It’s not much, but it’s not boring.  It just feels like the short version of a more major experience.

4 out of 5
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