
How do you create an Occult Detective in the last half of the 20th century? Edward D. Hoch found an old solution to a new problem of the rationality of today. He created a “false monster” detective. Like the writers of the original Gothic novels (such as Ann Radcliffe) he explains his monsters and miracles away…
Hoch created a new ghost-breaker from the left-overs of the pulps, Simon Ark. Fantastical in appearance, Ark’s nameless Watson describes the ghost-breaker as a Coptic priest–a schism group from the Roman Catholic Church, based in Egypt, the Copts believed that Christ had only one divine nature–possibly 1500 years old, though in apperance only “…tall and heavy-set; yet he carried himself with an ease and dignity that often made people forget his physical features and remember only the overpowering persuasion of his manner.” He can often be heard making cryptic remarks like “‘Would you believe it if I told you I walked the sands of Africa with Augustine, and talked wiyh Aquinas on the road to Naples, and visited John of the Cross in the monastery at Ubeda?'”
In one story we are given a possible origin of the stranger known as Simon Ark. Father Hadeen retells a parable told to him by Simon.
“…He spoke of other things this afternoon, of a strange Coptic priest in the first century after Christ, who wrote a gospel glorifying the Lord. The words were devout but hardly divinely inspired. The Fathers of the Church denounced it as a fraud, and the Coptic priest lost everything. He was in a unique if impossible situation–his writings had been holy praises to God, worthy of a place in Heaven, but the deceit he’d used in circulating them as a fifth gospel made such a reward impossible. It was a situation even baffling for the Almighty, and this man could be sebt neither to Heaven nor Hell. He was doomed to walk the earth forever, until such time as God would decide his fate.”
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 3:From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly