Deliver Us From Evil
Il-ħabel issikkat wisq, jaqaw?
Is the rope too tight?
This is the stark opening line of Karl Schembri’s new novel Eħlisna mid-Deni (Deliver Us From Evil), says the woman who edited it. In a small, stifling room, a man wakes up tied and confused, facing the person who’s holding him captive. He has no idea why he’s there, and neither do we. From that tense beginning, the story unfolds like a blend of psychological thriller and a reckoning with faith, drawing us through layers of guilt, repression, and abuse that span from the personal to the institutional, from the domestic to the divine. To edit Karl’s novel was to witness a writer transform silence into language, and pain into truth.
Eħlisna mid-Deni is rooted in Schembri’s own past; the legacy of a childhood overshadowed by
his father’s mental illness and the unbearable silence that followed his mother’s murder. For years, he tried to live as if none of it had ever happened, but some stories don’t let you go. Written during the Covid lockdowns and inspired by Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the novel is told through a single, unreliable voice: heavy with guilt, anger, and, fi nally, the urge to speak. It moves between the tense silence of a kidnapped priest who never speaks, the sterile language of legal documents, and the painful voices of those who lived through the harm he caused; harm the Church had hidden for years. But beneath the fiction, the pulse is real. Schembri’s own father struggled with mental illness and killed his mother; years later, as a journalist, he exposed the structures of clerical abuse that Malta — like many Catholic societies — had spent far too long denying.