From Booklist Sassy humor and gentle nostalgia is the surprisingly effective combination employed by Blatty, master of the horror genre and the author of The Exorcist, in this fond look back at 1940s- era New York. As 80-year-old Joey El Bueno begins his memoirs while a patient at Bellevue Hospital, he introduces his adolescent alter ego, a wisecracking Peruvian-Irish kid with an affinity for driving the staff at St. Stephen’s Grammar School batty. But the nuns aren’t the only ones going a little crazy; you see, lately Joey has struck up a friendship with a girl no one else seems to have seen or heard of, and Joey himself seems to know about things before they have happened. As readers attempt to puzzle out whether Joey has a fractured psyche or has broken through the time-space continuum, they will be treated to an entertaining romp through the Lower East Side conducted by an inimitable tour guide. --Margaret Flanagan Read more Review Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-alt:"Calisto MT"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-520092929 1073786111 9 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} From Fears Magazine - “A superbly executed blend of  tenderness and satire that comes to a powerful and emotional crescendo, Crazy is a marvelous work of fiction that cements Blatty’s place of honor among great American authors.” From the Washington PostReviewed by novelist Elizabeth HandIt's hard to believe, but local horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy. In addition to his comic novels, he worked with Blake Edwards on several films, including "A Shot in the Dark," the second Inspector Clouseau movie; he loved P.G. Wodehouse; and he was even compared to S.J. Perelman. All this came before those looming steps in Georgetown forever linked Blatty with his best-known work, "The Exorcist" (1971). Which makes his new novel, "Crazy," a return to form. It's a sweet-natured, often hilarious tale cast as the memoirs of an 82-year-old former screenwriter named Joey El Bueno. Joey's writing from a 10th-floor room at Bellevue Hospital, where the usually suspicious Nurse Bloor doesn't raise an eyebrow at his laptop because "she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type." Joey is the son of an Irish beauty who died giving birth to him and an impoverished Peruvian immigrant who made his living pushing a hot dog cart. Joey's memoir takes us back to the year he was a seventh-grader at St. Stephen's, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in 1941. That's where he first meets Jane Bent, a street-smart, foul-mouthed transfer student from Our Lady of Sorrows. At first, Joey finds her "nuttier than a truckload of filberts," but that changes when Jane flashes a $5 bill and suggests an afternoon at the movies. Many hours and three screenings of "Gunga Din" later, the two seem to have become an inseparable pair. Then they part, and Joey never sees her again. Not that Jane, anyway. I won't say more lest I spoil the pleasures of this 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. Blatty also cites Ray Bradbury and Robert Nathan as influences, and "Crazy" more than once invokes Kurt Vonnegut. Joey's memoir favors run-on sentences with a comedic payoff: "There was a breeze and these jillions of gulls all circling and squawking forlornly but with great agitation and high excitement as if they were in factions that were blaming one another for the loss of some unspoiled world, some paradise where every automobile was a convertible and where hats and awnings did not exist." Blatty has always been upfront about his Catholic faith. The opening of "The Exorcist" evokes "Lucifer upward-groping back to his God," and Crazy's poignant final pages make clear that, rather than an exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a reminder of Saint Paul's command, "While we have time, let us do good." Or, as Joey puts it, "What would Kurt Vonnegut do?" Hand's most recent novel is "Illyria." "Crazy is terrific! A wonderful novel: funny, touching and SO full of love!"--Julie Andrews“Crazy left me with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye.”-- Dread Central“With its wildly creative and humorous scenarios, Crazy is wise and witty, funny and sad. It’s a story of good and evil, of second chances, of coming to peace at the end of the road and welcoming the unknown.” --bookreporter.com“There’s a certain vaudevillian flair to all of Blatty’s  work, but it’s the sort of vaudeville that powers the absurdist despair of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot; one-liners and gags are just another way to deal with the inevitability of death. The difference is, there’s a core of faith and optimism at the heart of Blatty’s writing. Horror exists, as do evil and the monsters who perpetrate it, but there’s also God in his heaven, purpose, and at least the possibility of justice.” –-A.V. CLUB Read more About the Author William Peter Blatty is best known for his mega-bestselling novel The Exorcist. Blatty also cowrote the screenplay of the hilarious Inspector Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark. Known for his early comic novels, the New York Times proclaimed that “nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty,” describing him as “a gifted virtuoso who writes like S. J. Perelman.” Blatty lives with his wife and a son in Maryland. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneWhere do I begin? The seventh grade at St. Stephen’s on East 28th Street in 1941, I suppose, because that’s where and when I first met Jane, back before we grew up and she started disappearing and then reappearing in someplace like Tibet or Trucial Oman from where she’d send me picture postcards with tiny scrawled messages in different-colored inks such as, “Thinking of you sometimes in the morning” or “Angkor Wat really smells. Joey, don’t ever come here for a vacation,” but there’d be only a day between the postmarked dates and sometimes no difference at all between them, and then all of a sudden she’d reappear again looking years younger, which is nothing, I suppose, when compared to that time when supposedly she levitated six feet off the ground when she thought they were running out of Peter Paul Mounds candy bars at the refreshment counter of the old Superior movie house on 30th Street and Third Avenue back when there were el trains rumbling overhead and a nickel got you two or three feature films, plus a Buck Jones Western chapter, four cartoons, bingo and an onstage paddleball contest, when supposedly a theater usher approached her and told her, “Hey, come on, kid, get down, you can’t be doing that crazy stuff in here!” and right away she wobbled down to the seedy lobby carpet, gave the usher the arm and yelled, “That’s the same kind of crap they gave Tinkerbell!” but then I know you have no interest in any of these matters, so fine, let’s by all means move on and go back to the beginning.Which comes at the end.“Medication time.”It’s December 24, 2010, and I’m sitting by a window in a tenth-floor Bellevue Hospital recovery room staring down at a tugboat churning up a foaming white V at its prow in the East River’s death-dark suicide waters and looking like it’s hugging itself against the cold. “Hi ya, kiddo!” The pudgy and diminutive Nurse Bloor breezily waddles into my room, a hypodermic syringe upraised in her pudgy little staph-infested fingers. She stops by my chair and I look down at her feet and I stare. I’ve never seen a nurse in stiletto heels. She glances over at something I sculpted a couple of days before and says, “Hey, now, what’s that?” and I tell her that it’s Father Perrault’s wooden leg from Lost Horizon, but she doesn’t pursue it, nor does she react to my laptop computer: she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type.“Okay, a teensy little stick,” she says.I yelp, “Ouch!”“Oh, come on, now, don’t tell me that hurt!”Well, it didn’t, but I want to puncture her starched-white pride and maddening air of self-assurance. She scowls, slaps a Band-Aid on the puncture and leaves. Sometimes growth of the soul needs pain, which is something I have always been on the spot to give.The pneumatic door closes with a sigh. I turn my glance to my desk and the gift from Bloor that’s sitting on top of it, a foot-tall artificial Christmas tree with different-colored Band-Aids hanging from its branches. For a moment I stare at it dully, and then I shift my gaze to the dry and abandoned public pool down on the corner of First Avenue and 23rd where I almost drowned when Paulie Farragher and Jimmy Connelly kept shoving me back into the pool’s deep end every time I tried to climb up and out for air and I swore any number of choking, coughing blood oaths that if God let me live I would track them to Brazil or to China or the Yucatan, anyplace at all where I could offer them death without the comfort of the sacraments. Yes. I remember all of that. I do. I remember even though I’m eighty-two years old.Again.CRAZY Copyright © 2010 by William Peter Blatty Read more
M**I
Heartwarming Tale of Memory, Mystery, and Miracles from the author of...The Exorcist? Why Not? 4 Stars!
If you are familiar with the other works of W.P. Blatty and are looking for a terrifying or philosophical read, 'Crazy' may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a reflective, original, and heartwarming story that is well written, Crazy may be just what the doctor ordered. Crazy is a surprising departure from Blatty's previous work on screenplays, movies and iconic novels. The story is essentially a fictional romp through the mind of an elderly writer named Joey El Bueno as he lay dying in his hospital room. Mr.El Bueno takes us on a journey through some of the more significant events of his childhood in 1940s New York, with particular emphasis on rare interactions he had with his mysterious little pigtailed friend Jane Bent. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but there were a couple of things that might have been done differently and with greater effect. I have enormous respect for W.P. Blatty, but I find this particular work to be plagued with run on sentences. This unfortunately muddles the story somewhat for me. Further, although this charming tale is anything but predictable, the eventful passages we look forward to as readers are few and far between. Nevertheless, I would encourage any reader to 'power through' the run-on sentences and filler material. There is a reward, a metaphorical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Despite the fact that story progression seemed more circular than linear at times, Crazy possesses a powerful spiritual message delivered with Blatty's own peculiar brand of genius and sense of humor. It is for these reasons that I recommend this book to anyone looking for a leisurely, reflective, feel-good read. Catholicism helps, but is not a requirement to enjoy what Crazy has to offer. Crazy is Brilliant. 4 stars out of five.
C**R
I've yet to see Blatty fail!
This being one of the more complex works from the master of horror(it bring quite the opposite in fact), I write this review with torn heart. The majority of the book was "filler" type writing, and, sure, became admittedly droll at times, especially since 90% of the sentences dragged on past previous belief of possible length. There are some exciting, or well should I say, eventful passages throughout that make you think and are indeed deserving of remark, and every scene involving Jane was wonderful, and at the closing of the novel, because utterly magnificent.This bring me to the portion of the book that tears my heart. I tell you this, based on the final few chapters alone, this novel could easily achieve a masterful "5 star" rating. Only because of the long and mostly boring scenes elsewhere does it just undershoot it. In the closing chapters, there is a deeply concerning event that brings about a second in the final chapter or two. This second event ties up everything and even brought a welling tear to my eye.In closing, I recommend this book strongly to anyone looking for a leisurely and reflective read. The underlying message being love and (when looking for it), the awe-inspiring and never failing power and love of God.
D**S
As good as The Ninth Configuration
Utterly delightful, genuinely funny, and entirely sincere, earnest and nostalgic; some, might say, to a fault. Like Theodore Sturgeon, Blatty has never been one to hide his intentions; he's didactic and proud of it, dammit!Ever since The Exorcist, his theological thriller-mystery-comedies have been about the exploration of his Christian/Catholic faith. Whether he's examining the problem of evil, the nature of altruistic sacrifice, or, as in Crazy, the joys of being a good, moral person, Blatty is using his fiction as a way to understand his faith, or his hope as he might say.Crazy is really a companion piece to his autobiographical book I'll Tell Them I Remember You, the story about how his own mother shaped in him, and proved to him through miraculous means, his belief in God. You might say that his childhood was, indeed, crazy, and so it is not much a stretch to extrapolate that he is, in fact, the basis for Joey El Bueno, the main character here.It's odd to me that Blatty recently said that Dimiter was his most personally-important work; knowing what I know about him, and of his fiction, I'd rank Crazy and The Ninth Configuration as more important and more Blatty-esque. Both of these novels are funny and poignant, and while The Ninth Configuration is more philosophical in nature, Crazy is more personal and introspective.William Peter Blatty is getting old, and I'll be honest, I think about his passing. If this book is any indication, he does too! That makes me sad. I'm really going to miss him when's gone. In this day and age when so many people seem so cynical and skeptical about faith and religion, and when so many religious people act like heartless bastards, it's nice to know that there is someone like Blatty out there. To me he feels like a kindred spirit, a man and author I greatly admire. I guess I should just be thankful that his books even exist.
R**D
Humor from the author of the Exorcist
My first Blatty book was actually Dimiter (Excellent) - a powerful and amazing spiritual thriller. But one finds that Blatty has a comedy writing past - and this book is a great example of a book with a powerful spiritual message, an interesting narrative/story, and a great sense of humor. The characters and life in Manhattan are so real you think this might be autobiographical - but it's just great story telling. (Some PG13 language).
J**N
Crazy indeed
If you are looking for an 'Exorcist' or 'Legion' type novel, this isn't it. This novel is a rant through a dying man's mind of his childhood and the significant events that shaped him. Blatty weaves this story in an entertaining and poignant way, as is always the case with his writing, and what you end up with is a very enjoyable and deeply moving novel.
A**O
I'm so glad I found this book
"Crazy" is laugh-out-loud funny and touching. Highly recommended.
G**E
Not your usual Blatty
This was a surprising read from a great author. Not what you will expect from one of the master's of scare. But, you will be captivated, as I was, by the characters and the story itself. A great read.
J**E
Just Great
More great writing from an American genius
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