Raga Six (Doctor Orient #2)

Raga Six, by Frank Lauria

December, 1972  Bantam Books

The second volume of Doctor Orient picks up some time after the events of the first volume; indeed, it appears that a whole novel’s worth of stuff has occurred in the interim. When last we saw him, Dr. Owen Orient was taking down a Satanic cult in New York City, in between meditation sessions with his colleagues in his swank, three-floor townhome. But here in Raga Six, author Frank Lauria dispenses entirely with the setup of that first volume. 

But as mentioned, Orient has had another adventure since we last saw him; working with another doctor, one named Ferrari, Orient apparently cured the Vice President’s daughter of her lifelong paralysis of the legs and the girl can now walk again. But this is only infrequently mentioned in the narrative or in dialog; it all has happened after Doctor Orient ended and before Raga Six begins. Humorously, this material – which was never even covered in the first novel – is brought up more often than the actual plot of the first volume. In fact the events of Doctor Orient are only referred to once, in passing. 

The bigger focus here is that Dr. Orient has decided to let go of all of his worldly trappings: the three-floor home, the deluxe antique car, etc. Wanting to get back in touch with the world, Orient dispenses of all his wealth, as well as his retinue. In the previous book I remarked that there was certainly the vibe of a 1930s pulp to this series, with Orient the wealthy occultist leading a Doc Savage-esque team of followers. 

But that setup is now gone; Frank Lauria proves himself fearless of smashing apart what came before and starting anew. Which essentially is the vibe that drives this second volume of the series. I should note however that Dr. Owen Orient is not a driven protagonist, particularly not in this installment: his focus is more on “following his fate” and taking it one day at a time, with no exact goal or objective that he is working toward. 

This certainly lends Raga Six a laissez-faire vibe so far ast the plotting goes. After reading mostly men’s adventure novels for the past several years, it was a bit hard for me to adapt to a protagonist who was not driven to save people, or to get revenge, or who had some other goal he was working steadfastly to achieve; Owen Orient is driftless and aimless, and this extends to how the novel plays out. 

For example, even when he encounters evil, Orient is not driven to stop it. Like early in the book, he comes across a Satanic cult that operates out of the Lower East Side. Instead of smashing it, like your average men’s adventure protagonist would, Orient instead bides his time to figure out what is going on, and only gradually decides to perform an exorcism to save the two people who have been possessed by a demon. So yes, he does save these people, but what I mean to say is that he is not driven to do so; it takes him a while to figure out what is going on, mostly because Orient once again seems curiously incapable of noticing signs of the supernatural, a plot contrivance that stymied him in the first book. 

In a way Raga Six can almost be read as a standalone. Most of the characters who were so important in Doctor Orient aren’t even in this followup, and Orient himself is a different man. And as mentioned Lauria does not refer back to that previous book. Orient walks away from everything, and on a whim heads to the Lower East Side. It’s been five years since I read the first book, but I recall it did a phenomenal job of capturing all the details of the Groovy Age, complete with a psychedelic nightclub in Manhattan. 

In Raga Six, however, the Groovy Age is replaced by the Hippie Age; Orient, in his early 30s, spends the first quarter of the novel in the company of a group of Lower East Side hippies. Lauria really takes his time with the narrative – it runs to 277 pages of small, dense print, and is not a quick read by any means – and allows these characters to breathe. In many ways Raga Six has more in common with the low-simmer potboilers of Burt Hirschfeld and other contemporary popular authors than it does with horror; this is not a fast-moving horror tale in the least. 

While he might not be the most action-prone series protagonist, Dr. Orient still at least gets laid. This is courtesy Moon Girl, a sexy hippie chick Orient encounters during an East Side music festival that quickly devolves into a riot, with cops tear-gassing the hippies who refuse to leave the area. Curiously, Lauria makes it clear that the hippies are the ones who start the riot, refusing to comply with the police and then throwing things at them. I found this quite prescient in our post-“summer of mostly peaceful but fiery protests” world. 

Moon Girl has a five-year-old son named Julian, and soon enough the two are living with Orient. This seems to set up an entirely new cast for the series, but Lauria will change his mind and drop both Moon Girl and Julian for the majority of the text. More focus is placed on Cowboy, a drug dealer who puts Orient to work, having him manage the various deals and payoff schemes and whatnot. As mentioned, the plotting here would be more at home in a piece of hippie lit than a book with “horror” labelled on its spine. 

Through Moon Girl, Orient finds out about a strange group operating out of a storefront on the East Side. Moon Girl has a friend who has been acting weird lately, and Orient goes to visit her – and gradually suspects she is being inducted into a Satanic cult. He also meets the mysterious man who runs the place, a guy who goes around in a black rubber suit and carries a whip, along with the guy’s wife, a beautiful young woman who during seances will channel the voices of dead people for a paying clientele. 

There follows a great sequence where Orient gains the employ of an acquaintance, a heavyset woman who is famous for giving readings in the city, and the two contrive to perform an excorcism on the possessed husband and wife without their knowing it. Lauria has certainly done his occult rituals homework, and as with the first book, Raga Six is filled to the brim with arcane lore, particularly here where Orient banishes the demon that has possessed these two. 

But here’s the thing – what would have been enough for a single novel is over and done with in a few chapters, and never mentioned again! Instead the wily-nily plotting has it that Orient is soon off on a ten-day voyage via freighter to Tangier(!), sent off by Joker, who for plot-contrivance reasons has flown the coop and left Orient with a ticket for this ocean voyage. And, because he has nothing else to do, Orient just goes along with it. 

It’s quite brazen how Lauria jams so many separate plots together into the novel; soon enough the previous quarter of the novel is immaterial, as everything now focuses on Orient’s fellow passengers on the ship, in particular the mysterious Dr. Aleistar Six and his retinue. Among them is the titular Raga Six, Dr. Six’s wife: a lovely woman with pale skin, yellow eyes, silver hair, and “full breasts.” The latter concession surprised me, as Frank Lauria is not the most exploitative of authors; as with Doctor Orient, lurid and sensational details are minimal, the author going for more of a reserved tenor in his narrative. 

There’s also Pia, a beauty who seems to be a “potential,” meaning she harbors latent psychic abilities. Orient is interested in her, but the overbearing Dr. Six seems to have a firm grip on Pia. Regardless, Dr. Orient enjoys himself a good ol’ three-way; one night Pia calls him telepathically and Orient goes to her, but ends up in bed with both Pia and Raga. Again Lauria does not dwell on the sleaze, instead doling out lines like, “he sunk into her honeyed depths” and whatnot. (For some reason I’m suddenly hungry for Honey Nut Cheerios!) 

There is a great liberal vibe to Raga Six, and of course I mean the traditional definition of “liberal,” in that Orient approaches everything with an open mind and a lack of judgment. I miss liberals like that, don’t you?? So Orient’s three-way with Raga and Pia is just another event in his easy-going, wherever-fate-takes-me life, with no hangups or judgment or condemnation. This extends to Orient’s drug usage, but that is minimal in this volume. We do however get more scenes of Orient and others staring into the tips of their cigarettes as they smoke, something we were told incessantly in the previous book. 

Only gradually does Lauria bring any kind of tension or “horror” into this interminable sea voyage. It’s mostly centered around Dr. Six and his possessive attitude toward Pia. This comes to a head when Orient’s young cabin mate, Presto, runs off with Pia in Tangier, and Six goes off in rage-filled pursuit…and Orient shacks up with Raga for several days. Again we are more in Burt Hirschfeld territory, as Lauria focuses on their growing love and their plans to be together, once Raga divorces Dr. Six. 

Horror material does not return until Six comes back into the narrative and retrieves Raga, a submissive Pia in tow, and off they go to Six’s clinic in Italy. Now as we’ll recall, Orient is in love with Raga Six and knows something strange is going on with her husband. He also suspects some misdeed has happened with his young cabin mate; Dr. Six claims he left Presto in a drug coma in Marrakesh. So Orient goes there to check on him…and ends up spending a month working on his meditation skills and such with a guy there who is one of the Nine Unknown Men, and who trained with Orient’s own master, Ku. 

This is what I mean about the laissez-faire plotting. You’d expect Orient would be gung-ho to find out what the hell was going on with Dr. Six and to claim Raga as his own, but instead the next chapters are all focused on Orient astrally voyaging to find out what happened to Presto, who truly is in a coma, but one that does not seem to be drug induced. 

The plot changes again when Orient finally goes to Italy and hooks up with Sordi, his former chaffeur. A girl in Sordi’s village has come down with a “sleeping sickness,” which of course made me wonder if Stan The Man Lee read this novel and copped the idea for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. Orient tries to figure out if this could be a supernatural menace, then at great page length tracks down Dr. Six’s clinic – and there’s a rushed action scene as Orient frees Pia and Raga from the now-maniacal Dr. Six. 

Again, a normal novel would end here, but instead Orient receives a telepathic message from one of his students, Argyle, a black American who factored into the previous book and is an actor; he’s in Rome shooting a cowboy movie, and what’s more Moon Girl and her son Julian are with him. Dr. Orient heads there…and learns that little Julian is lost, having disappeared a few days before while they were visiting the Coliseum. 

So what does Orient do? He starts meditating while Raga offers to make sandwiches. It’s kind of impressive how Lauria consistently refrains from injecting any kind of tension or drama into his tale. Instead of freaking out and canvassing the city, Moon Girl is content to wait while Argyle and Orient voyage to the astral plane to see if they can locate her son. There’s even a part where they discover they have more success in the morning, so they decide to break for the rest of the day and start again the next dawn! 

I admit, this leisurely approach to the plot can be a little wearying, especially if one wishes for a more proactive protagonist. Also, it must be mentioned that Orient is very much a master of the metaphysical; the extent of his physical abilities would be meditation, and it’s not like he happens to be a karate master on the side or anything. He’s not tough at all, is what I mean to say, and the finale is especially grating because it consists of Orient sleeping due to the psychic attacks of the monster who turns out to be behind everything. 

Yes, sleeping – Orient spends the final pages either in bed or struggling to keep his eyes open. That is when he isn’t turning on faucets or throwing around salt as banishing rituals to ward off the psychic attacks. It might be “legitimate” so far as the occult stuff goes, but it makes for a very lame “action finale.” Indeed when you visualize what Orient does in the finale – struggling not to sleep, even so lethargic at one point that he passes out while trying to chase a villain into the woods – it becomes quite clear why there was never a Doctor Orient movie. 

I won’t ruin the surprise finale, but it becomes clear who the main villain is, and Orient alone must face this villain. That said, the “thrilling conclusion” is again sort of uninententionally humorous, as it features Orient – again trying not to fall asleep – muttering some words as he stares at a ring on his finger. At least Bantam Books did not market Raga Six as an action thriller, but still. The reader kind of expects a little more. 

The leisurely plotting extends to the final pages, as despite the book ending, Lauria keeps writing, and eventually Orient heads back to New York, where it turns out he still owns his three-floor home. We’re told he spends “months” getting back into the swing of things, working at a hospital and opening up his own practice. Presumably this is all setup for the next volume, Lady Sativa, which came out the following year – and I’ll try to get to it sooner than I got to this second volume. 

Overall I enjoyed Raga Six, appreciating Frank Lauria’s strong writing and his determination to let the characters breathe, but at the same time the lethargic plotting got to be a drag. But then, if you want action with your ‘70s occult sleaze, you’d probably be more happy with the concurrent Mind Masters series (which I think I might read again one of these days).

Doctor Orient (aka Doctor Orient #1)

Doctor Orient, by Frank Lauria
September, 1970  Bantam Books

I first learned about this series several years ago, thanks to Curt Purcell’s glowing reviews on The Groovy Age Of Horror. (Anyone know what happened to Curt?) I picked up most of the books afterward but just never got around to reading this first installment…until now! Very much along the lines of The Mind Masters, Doctor Orient handles occult, ESP, and related environs in a serious manner. There might be a little more action in The Mind Masters, but the characters in this one are more likable and, more importantly, there’s more of a period flavor, with even a “psychedelic discotheque” acting as the headquarters of a group of Satanists.

I went in assuming series protagonist Dr. Owen Orient would be a Doctor Strange type, a master of the mystic arts and all that. Rather, while he’s studied all manner of arcana, familiar with spirits and spells and casually talking about his past lives, he’s really more focused on ESP. In this capacity he’s put together a small group of “pilgrims” who meet in his three-story pad on Riverside Drive in New York and work on their psychic skills, the goal to eventually reach out to the rest of the world. Lauria seems to have been inspired by the pulps of the ‘30s, with Orient having a very pulpy flair: he’s always dressed in white, and his “long” black hair has a skunk-like streak of white running through it. He’s got a mansion, a vintage auto, a butler, and a retinue of helpers, all just like some hero of a ‘30s pulp. The only thing he lacks is a true love-type, though in this first installment we get a muddled backstory about a girl he was in love with in one of those previous lives. That’s about on the level of “my girlfriend lives in Canada,” though.

At 200+ pages of small, dense print, Doctor Orient is one of those novels that takes a little longer to read than you might first suspect. And as is typical with such books, a lot of it could’ve been whittled out. There’s a bit too much repetition, and Orient doesn’t prove himself to be the most capable of protagonists this first time out. I read somewhere that Lauria’s intent was to deliver a “nonviolent hero,” or something to that effect, but unfortunately this gives us a hero who spends most of the narrative sitting around in his pad and meditating, chanting, or staring at the lit end of his cigarette while in deep thought (something he does so much you could make a drinking game out of it…or I guess a smoking game would be more apt). Even the climax is handled with chanting and visionary trips through the astral plane, and this is another thing The Mind Masters did better, with the hero using his mental powers to wreak physical havoc.

The action of this first installment ceters around a Satanic cult led by a black mage called Susej (Jesus backwards, though I don’t think any of the characters make this connection); as mentioned the cult operates out of a cheap-looking psychedelic club in New York called the Seventh Door. There’s a great part that’s borderline rock novel territory where a haughty and hotstuff sixteen year-old babe with mental powers (which she uses to always get her way) ventures inside and watches the house band play; their psychedelic rock, as Lauria describes it, sounds along the lines of Syd-era Pink Floyd. Unfortunately this rock stuff doesn’t take up much of the narrative space, but we do eventually learn that the girl, Addison Tracey, begins singing with the group, even recording albums in the club’s studio booth – plus there’s the cool period detail of the psychedelic lights in the club flashing in time with the music. Sadly no bodypainted go-go dancers are mentioned.

The lead singer is a silver-eyed guy named Seth, who turns out to be a sort of headhunter for the cult, seeking out people with similar mental powers. He initiates Addison into the cult, which entails a black mass – again, much more sleazily and pulpily demonstrated in The Mind Masters #2 – culminating with Addison having sex with a demon. And speaking of which, Lauria’s never too graphic with the exploitative material, more concerned with the occult power Addison will be provided with in exchange for her soul. The back cover has it that Addison will go on to act as a seductress in the Seventh Door, luring wealthy and influential men into the cult’s snare, but sadly the book leaves this as more of a minor detail, and worse yet Addison is pretty much dropped from the narrative. Same goes for Seth, who seems to be built up as Susej’s henchman, but doesn’t even appear in the climactic confrontation. I was actually into this psychedelic club/rock group stuff more than anything else in the novel, but sadly Lauria spends much more time with Owen and his comrades meditating, venturing onto the astral plane, and staring at the burning ends of their cigarettes.

Orient’s circle is relatively small, and surprisingly doesn’t have the “strong female character” demanded in modern entertainment/engineering. There’s Hap, a baseball player who left the group three months ago because he couldn’t handle the vibes, Argyle, a famous black actor who sports a big Afro, and Levi, a hirsute dentist. There’s also Sordi, Orient’s butler, who asks to be brought into the group’s fold so he can help them in their ESP struggles, and finally a bishop named Redson, who despite not being comfortable with reincarnation and all that jazz still has a pretty firm grasp of occult spells and demon-casting. He actually plays a more central role in the fight with Susej than any of the others; Levi is lost in the narrative fold, and Argyle’s big sequence has him venturing solo to the Seventh Door…and easily getting caught by Susej. Humorously, our hero Dr. Orient is unable to even save Argyle, being made a fool of on national TV by Susej, and Argyle has to free himself. As I say, Orient isn’t the most heroic of protagonists.

Orient comes into the action through Hap, who returns to the group with a big problem – three months ago he hooked up with a lovely brunette named Malta, and they went around doing ESP readings and the like. But now Malta’s fallen into a mysterious, almost supernatural coma. Orient ventures into “hyper-space,” not to be confused with the astral plane, and there detects a massive evil force which has ensnared Malta’s soul. Here he also learns – via too-long flashback sequences – that he and Malta were lovers in a past life. Frustratingly, Malta never even really appears in the book; she’s comatose the entire time, then her slumbering form has been stolen from Orient’s pad, and then we find out she’s dead, and then Orient and his comrades are fighting to save her soul from being consumed.

Lauria has clearly read up on the occult subjects – and he informs us of this fact in the “about the author” bio at the end – so we do get a lot of chanting and prayer circles and people flashing on a gold swastika in blue light for protection, the latter which sort of upsets Redson until he’s informed the swastika symbolized holy power long before the cross. Meanwhile Susej, who turns out to be a former religious schoolmate of Redson’s named D’Te, plots to take over the world for “the Clear One.” Thanks to some modern thinking by Seth, Susej begins appearing on TV to heal people; in particular he becomes a regular on Joe Kirk’s late night TV talk show – a clear take on Johnny Carson (back when he was still in New York), with the difference being that we’re informed Kirk uses his show to make fun of people. Johnny was nothing if not respectful to his guests, except when he was jamming egg yolks in Burt Reynolds’s face.

And see that’s one of the problems with Doctor Orient. The third quarter features lots of scenes of our heroes sitting around and watching TV, complaining about how quickly Susej is attaining power; people now flock to him as a guru with supernatural healing powers, which is all part of Susej’s plan of domination. There’s no action, per se, save for when Susej sends a couple poltergeists over to Orient’s place to tear it up. Our heroes run away and stay in Redson’s rectory. Also as mentioned Argyle tries to take matters into his own hands toward the end, but gets caught, which entails lots of WTF? bits on the astral plane where animals chase him and whatnot; there’s also a part earlier on where Orient ventures into the astral plane and is lured into a sort of venus flytrap section which almost kills him.

The finale builds toward a big confrontation, but it lacks much verve. Susej, who has already magickally bitch-slapped Orient on TV at Joe Kirk’s show, plans a big event, and Orient and team converge on the scene to chant and pray away. Instead of physical confrontation it plays off on the metaphysical tip, with a resolution to Orient and Malta’s eternal love. Lauria ends the novel almost abruptly, which is odd given the preceding pages of too much repetition and stalling; Susej, defeated on the astral plane, collapses, his worldly following crushed, and Orient just stands there looking. At any rate he was to return soon enough; I have most of the books that followed, and here’s hoping they are a bit more spirited (no pun intended).