'Golgotha Falls' (341 pp) was published by Pocket Books in September 1985. The stepback front cover art was done by Lisa Falkenstern.
Frank De Felitta (1921 - 2016) wrote a number of well-known Paperbacks from Hell during the 70s and 80s, among them Audrey Rose (1975) and The Entity (1978). 'Golgotha Falls' was the first of his novels that I've ever read. It's pretty awful. I'm not all that excited about reading any of his other novels.
The premise of 'Golgotha' is not without promise. The narrative is set in the eponymous small Massachusetts town, a town fallen on hard times. The modest Church of Eternal Sorrows, constructed in the 19th century to serve the townspeople, has a troubling history of priests gone mad; whisperings of ghosts and spirits; and a thick atmosphere of entropy and decay. It has been abandoned for decades.
As 'Golgotha' opens two parapsychologists, the shapely Anita Wagner and the broad-shouldered Mario Gilbert, have come from Harvard to conduct a scientific investigation of the rumored supernatural phenomena said to haunt the Church. Their expedition happens to coincide with the arrival of a Jesuit priest named Eamon James Malcolm, who intends to reconsecrate the church and purge it of its evil reputation.
As events unfold, the trio will confront strange signs and wonders, and their own inner demons. And the evil that resides in the ruined church in Golgotha Falls will rise to strike at the Catholic Church itself.........
I struggled to finish 'Golgotha Falls', coming to close to giving up on it altogether numerous times.
One reason the book is so bad is the prose style. Author De Felitta belongs to the Ramsey Campbell School of Horror Fiction, and encrusts every paragraph with empty sentences and purple prose:
In the shadows of collapsing buildings, the dogs moved as though underwater, with a lolling, doll-like swaying of their heads.
The priest was blond, and his hair trembled in the night breeze while the crickets screamed an abominable and indifferent derision.
Red ants fled the heat, like animated drops of blood fleeing into the soil.
Along the bottom of the church, the red-brown dirt oozed like soft feces.
Golgotha Falls had split them like living wood from dead.
The jet droned on, sleepily, bouncing into stormy night clouds.
I could perhaps tolerate the purple prose if the plot had sufficient momentum to compensate, but the reality of 'Golgotha Falls' is that the plot is worst thing about the book. All of its melodramatic and overheated prose can't conceal the fact that nothing happens.
There are all sorts of what may be hallucinations, or visions, or actual physical manifestations of Evil, but the author's refusal to assign these things a unambiguous presence means the the book reads more as a labored psychological thriller than a horror novel.
In its closing chapters 'Golgotha Falls' tries to inject energy into the narrative by venturing into 'cosmic' territory, but even here, the final confrontation between Good and Evil is so drawn out and overwritten that the novel ends on a decidedly flaccid note.
Summing up, 'Golgotha Falls', for all its great cover design, is a dud. Those seeking the most rewarding entries in the canon of the Paperbacks from Hell will want to pass on this novel.
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