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

Review

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 Post

Reviewed by novelist Elizabeth Hand

It'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

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Where 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