The Crooked Heart of Ritual

Father Elias is a brilliant, skeptical priest armed with a post-structuralist education and a firm belief in psychology. He sets out to interview the Church's most celebrated exorcist, Father Thomas Coyle, intending to "deconstruct the legend" and expose the rite as a form of "social engineering". He believes the demon is merely a "psychological scapegoat" or a "metaphor for the human mind". But the interview, recorded on an old reel-to-reel machine, quickly becomes a "document of collision". Father Coyle, a "weary warrior" hollowed out by his experiences, recounts his most disturbing cases—irreducible phenomena from Manila, the American South, and London that defy all logical categorization. He describes his enemy not as trauma, but as a "customized, surgical intelligence" with "malice". As Coyle unburdens his "painful, exhausting knowledge", the interview frame shatters. Elias's academic certainty crashes against the "raw, terrifying fact of the monster", leading to a complete philosophical collapse [cite_start]and a final, horrifying confrontation where the skeptic must face the evil he dismissed as myth [cite: 719-721].