"The killer will still do as he wants. He's smart." Ramona tapped the side of her head for emphasis. "Otherwise, they would've caught him by now. He's one jump ahead of the police."
"I hope not," Jeffrey said. "I hope they stop the killing. It's really awful being dead."
Young insurance salesperson Samantha Croft lives in a big apartment in a Manhattan building that is kind of creepy. The building exterior is decorated with man-sized gargoyles that are clearly visible through her windows. The building owners are cheapos who install only the dimmest available light bulbs in the corridors, rendering the stairwells and hallways quite dark. Next door to Samantha's apartment is Ramona Blattfield, a fifty-year-old witch who was lonely so summoned the ghost of her dead nephew, Jeffrey, who died at age eighteen like twenty years ago, to keep her company. The building superintendent is a huge hairy long-armed deaf mute named Jose. And, uh, oh yeah, young women keep getting murdered and dismembered in the ground floor corridor that leads to where tenants are to deposit their trash. Six young women, about one a week, have been killed and mutilated in that precise spot as Chapter 1 begins (we witnessed murder number six in the Prologue.)
Samantha's roommate, an anorexic slut named Morgan, goes away for a week's trip to Bermuda aboard the yacht of her fat and bald--but rich!--boyfriend, Charlie, leaving Samantha alone in the big apartment with the big scary gargoyles and the big scary walk in closets. (Murders or no murders, this apartment sounds awesome.) Murders seven and eight closely follow Morgan's departure, and over the following handful of days many new people enter Samantha's life and the novel's narrative--there's the killer, of course, who turns out to be a demon who is inhabiting the body of an incompetent Satan-worshipping wizard; an economics professor who does Van Helsing-type work on the side and has battled this very demon before; and two men who become rival claimants for the sweet love and hot body of Samantha, the police detective in charge of stopping all the killings in Sam's building and a rich guy Samantha is trying to sell insurance to who turns out to already know the cop and the economist. Eventually the demon is put down, but who will survive the struggle, and who among the survivors will maintain his or her sanity? And what course will virginal Sam's love life take?
Less than halfway through Demon Within I was regretting having suspended my reading of 1956 SF short stories promoted by famous SF anthologist Judith Merril to read this thing, which is like 360 pages of text, and by two-thirds of the way through I was groaning with the knowledge that I had to endure 120 more pages of bad sentences, extraneous scenes about Ramona, Jeffrey, and Morgan, tiresome passages describing Samantha's erotic dreams and her conflicted feelings about the two other components of the novel's love triangle, as well as the scenes about the monster and the murders, none of which are any good.
Reed's writing style is poor; she offers up simple sentences like those from a juvenile book and, worse, regularly uses words in ways that are distractingly odd, or simply incorrect. Demon Within often reads like a college paper by an ESL student. For example, we get "proceed" for "precede" twice ("She wanted to kiss him, to go to lunch, because that would proceed their love-making" appears on page 112 and then on 114 we've got "Lunch usually proceeded their lovemaking.") More than once Reed employs a phrase I have never heard before to describe wasting some other person's money:
Hadn't he told her on the way over here to throw it all away and buy new at his expense? And yet, she wasn't about to take advantage of Charlie and his good nature by taking him for broke--
There also seemed to be issues with the past perfect tense, Reed leaving out "had" before a verb in several sentences where I thought on belonged. Obviously I can't put all the blame on Reed for these issues--it looks like the people at Leisure Books skimped on their duty to the grue-seeking public to proofread and copy edit this volume.
So, thumbs down for Demon Within. Flea market fail!
If you crave a more detailed description of the main plot of Demon Within, and all the depressing backstories Reed provides all the many characters and all the pointless subplots, as well as a sample of some of the sentences I have decreed bad or merely incorrect (remember when I presented sample sentences from Tanith Lee's Death's Master because I thought they were beautiful?--Dana Reed is like the Bizarro World or Opposite Day Tanith Lee), read on. But please feel free to move on with your life if you wish--you can probably derive more entertainment from watching trains or shooting rats down at the dump, and when you come back we'll probably be talking about 1956 SF stories again.
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There are a lot of characters in Demon Within, and they all have bleak backstories. For example, Jeffrey the ghost was in Heaven before his aunt Ramona summoned him back to Earth to "live" as a "vaporous kind of material resembling gas," but Heaven, though a "place with trees, and grass and sunshine, the place where good people went," didn't suit Jeffrey. He tells Ramona it is awful being dead, but was equally awful being alive, because, as a Jewish boy living on Long Island in the Sixties he was subjected to vicious anti-Semitism. His "friends" gave him LSD-laced candy and then used hypnotic suggestion techniques (these kids were evil bigots, but also smart!) to induce a "trip" in which Nazi scientists at Dachau removed his organs before sending him to the gas chamber.
Despite using Jeffrey to try to exploit our horror at anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in that one scene, Reed mostly uses Ramona and Jeffrey as comic relief. Even though her nephew is just a puff of vapor, Ramona keeps forgetting he's a ghost and worries he might get hurt. There are sight gag scenes in which Jeffrey tries to eat food. When Samantha spots Jeffrey, who looks to her like a "funnel of dust" or a "ball of dust," she gets scared but soon forgets all about this apparition--Ramona and Jeffrey's narrative has no bearing whatsoever on the main monster plot.
Morgan, master of the binge and purge technique of weight management, is another character whose story adds nothing to main plot, but instead of comic relief, Reed endeavors to use her to add some twisted and evil sex to her story. Morgan is anorexic because she suffered psychological abuse from her father. Morgan's mother died from complications in giving birth to Morgan, and Dad declared that when Morgan was 18, she would take her mother's place in his bed! To tide himself over, he made Morgan strip for him while he masturbated. Morgan's mother had a full, voluptuous, body, so Morgan tried to be as skinny as possible in hopes of deterring Dad's attentions, and at 18 ran away from home before he could lay a hand on her; because Dad wanted her to be sexually pure when she married him, Morgan has ever since pursued a course of promiscuity.
Jose the deaf mute super is the killer's seventh victim, and he is no exception to the sad backstory rule. The villagers Jose grew up among in Puerto Rico considered him cursed by God because of his disabilities and ugliness, and when he was arrested for statutory rape (for having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend at age 18) the police castrated him. Jose's mistreatment at the hands of the cops down in PR is the reason he hasn't gone to the NYPD to report that he saw the killer, a "beast" with glowing eyes, clad in a cape or shroud, and with no skin so Jose could see its veins pumping blood as he watched the monster carve up a dead girl's breasts with a dagger. When Jose finally does decide he'd better tell the fuzz what he knows, the monster, which has psychic powers, reads this intent in his mind and tortures him to death. The torture session is interrupted by a policewoman armed with one of those rare .38 revolvers that has a safety, but it avails her not--she is victim number eight.
In Chapter 4 (Demon Within has 18 chapters) we are directly introduced to the killer, who is a Satan-worshipping would-be wizard possessed by a demon. The Satanist's case of demonic possession has a lot in common with multiple personality disorder and lycanthropy; the human and demonic personalities alternate control over the body, which changes into hideous skinless and noseless monster form when the demon is ascendent, and the mundane personality can only dimly recall what the demon was up to when he regains control--his memories of the murders are like the memories of dreams. Wiz has only the most limited esoteric training, and repeatedly--and unsuccessfully--tries to cast the spell that will free him from possession by the demon. Performing the ritual requires the use of fresh human body parts, and the demonic personality relishes collecting the parts and has chosen Samantha's building as the target of its operations because it hates Christianity and the gargoyles make it think of the apartment building as a church and the young women he mutilates as nuns.
The demon has lots of psychic powers, and, in Chapter 4, Reed introduces a sort of science fiction element to her novel that she never mentions again. It seems human beings used to have all kinds of mental abilities before reliance on technology stunted man's access to his subconscious; she cites as examples of men who used these abilities to foretell the future Leonardo and Nostradamus! Throughout the book Reed describes such powers as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition as the product of "using the subconscious mind," but that reactionary Luddism theme never resurfaces.
A little later in the novel we learn all about the particular demon who is possessing Wiz, Asgar, lord of the fourth level of Acheron, and Asgar has a sad backstory of his own! It seems that an innocent Christian child was accidentally sent to Hell, to Acheron's particular domain, though some divine bureaucratic mistake. (Reed's conception of the Christian afterlife, in which people judged good by God can accidently end up in Hell and might not like Heaven if they are fortunate enough to get there is a strange one.) This little girl was so pure and kind that the demons were afraid to torture her! Asgar eventually just sent this kid up to Heaven, enraging Satan, who punished him by compelling him live in the body of a human. Asgar is helping his host collect the body parts essential to the exorcism spell because he wants to be cast out of the mortal's body.
The cop in charge of solving the murders, Ron Wheatley, is in a sexless marriage because he shot his wife with a rifle in a hunting accident; Reed, who put a safety on the police woman's service revolver, insists on calling the rifle bullet that paralyzed Mrs. Wheatley from the waist down "a shell" and does so repeatedly. Ron can sense when the monster is killing somebody, can see the murders in dream-like visions; for a while we are led to believe this is because the shock of crippling his own wife gave Ron psychic powers, and later it is suggested that this is a clue that he is the devil-worshiper whose body is host (Reed doesn't say "host," though, she says "harborer") of the demon.
With his wife out of action in the bedroom, Ron is perpetually horny and while investigating the latest murders, that of Jose and his female colleague, Ron starts flirting with Samantha (she is "tall and leggy and beautiful," after all) when he is supposed to be questioning her. For her part, Samantha is entranced by Ron's muscles and eyes and hair (he is "a gorgeous hunk of a man") but her experience of being raped in the woods near her small hometown as a teen has made her skittish around men and nervous about sex (her vulgar and promiscuous work colleagues at the insurance agency consider her a prude.)
The woods and trees are important to Samantha, who grew up in the country and liked to go to the woods to commune with nature and relax, only to repeatedly encounter horror under the trees, and to the wiz, who casts his spells in the woods, and Reed tries to use descriptions of trees to set a mood, but these efforts sometimes make no sense. For example, in one scene we are told that, while walking by Central Park, Samantha "stopped for a moment to stare at a tree growing so high it was frightening...." On the day she was raped in the woods we are told that the "leaves had shed their greenish pallor and were now done up in various hues of brown and yellow and gold, all blended together in a soundless cacophony bursting with the miracle of life." Using the living green leaves as a symbol of death and the dead leaves as a symbol of life is pretty dopey.
Samantha agrees to a lunch date with Ron, but has to put it off because she has an important appointment with a prospective client, Garrett Lang. Garrett may be filthy rich today, owning a penthouse apartment that takes up the entire top floor of a Manhattan building as well as a yacht and a Hamptons mansion, but as a kid he was an impoverished farm boy clad in hand-me-downs in upstate New York. His father disowned him when he declared his interest in going to college instead of taking over the unprofitable family farm. In college, the ambitious Garrett was taken under the wing of J. J. Holliman, "one of the country's leading professors in the theory of economics." But J. J.'s real passion is the occult, and he wanted Garrett to join him in those weird studies and in the crusade against the forces of evil. But Garrett broke the old man's heart by turning his back on a life of battling Satan and his minions to become a rich businessman. One of Reed's few ambitious literary flourishes is the idea that Garrett has had two fathers who each tried to map out a life for him and he disappointed both by choosing his own path--the path to riches!
The same day Garrett hears that his mentor J. J. is coming to town to hunt the killer and he wants Garrett to help him in his forbidding task is the day of his appointment with Samantha. When Samantha sees Garrett she has a shock--Garrett looks just like the man who has been her lover for years in the sex dreams Reed keeps describing to us! These sex dreams offer Reed an opportunity to use the word "blend" in an idiosyncratic fashion:
He had hazel eyes and they never seemed to blend with the rest of him. His skin was too dark, too finely tanned; his hair too brown, despite the slight hint of grey at the temples. No, they didn't blend.
Garrett's dissatisfaction with his life offers Reed a chance to use "careless" in an unusual way:
Everything around him, the goods he'd acquired, all were ill gotten gains, the result of his careless dealings and deal making...
Anyway, Garrett is attracted to Samantha and they make a date and meet for dinner. While Samantha is in her apartment getting ready for this date, one of her work colleagues, June DeCarlo, a forty-year-old woman whose parents died of heart attacks when she was a kid and who wears a charm bracelet heavy with charms--one for each man who has proposed to her and been rejected--comes to the building hoping to visit Samantha and engage in a little epater le bourgeois excitement by telling Sam the prude all about the S&M sex she had last night that has left her covered in scars and bruises. Sam misses out on this excitement because June does not make it beyond the ground floor of the building, instead being slashed by the killer and then raped as she bleeds to death. Victim ten is an old drunk who sees the monster carrying away June's head wrapped in discarded newsprint.
Samantha's dinner with Garrett is a little rocky because the smell of cooking meat reminds her of that time she found her best friend's smoldering corpse in the woods; you see, a few days before he raped the teenaged Sam, that ski mask wearing malefactor who took Sam's virginity raped, murdered and burned Samantha's friend. You'll be happy to know this guy is not on the loose; Samantha was his last victim because she managed to turn the tables on him, getting out from under him when he was distracted by his own orgasm and then setting him on fire with his own gasoline and matches.
Still, Samantha and Garrett really hit it off, and Ron finds he has a serious rival in the race to bed Samantha. And it turns out this is not the first time Ron and Garrett have been at odds! When Garrett first moved to New York in pursuit of his fortune some ten years ago he met Ron and they became best friends, though they later had a falling out and Ron ever since has bitterly envied Garrett his financial success. And now Garret is getting in the way of Ron's hopes for a hot and heavy extramarital affair! So, when Ron should be doing his detective work, examining bodies nine and ten, he is spying on Garrett and Samantha!
Another link between characters who initially appeared to be unconnected is revealed in the middle third of the novel: J. J. has tangled before with Asgar. Reed gives us a flashback to J. J.'s earlier battle with the lord of the fourth level of Acheron, and we see that J. J. survived the fight by praying to Jesus, who whipped up a powerful wind that distracted Asgar so J. J. could grab the demon's skinless testicles and squeeze them with all his might. This alarming wrestling hold is the occasion of a particularly bad sentence that features an unidiomatic use of the word "stronghold," or maybe just a missing space between two words:
The old man seized the opportunity to suck in a long swallow of air and crumpled to the floor, but not before getting a stronghold on the genitals of the naked beast, Asgar's skinless flesh yielding to pain.
Halfway through the novel Ron takes the lead in his competition with Garrett to nail Samantha and his competition with J.J. to nail the killer--or so he thinks! Distinctive marks left on June's headless body lead Ron to her S&M one-night stand, and, thinking he has solved the murders, he throws that Bronx perv into prison! He takes Sam out to dinner to share the good news and then he takes her back to her apartment where he provides Sam with her first ever consensual sexual experience. She need not worry about an unwanted pregnancy, because Ron is sterile! But a few hours later she learns something else that does give her pause--that Ron is married!
Who spilled the beans? Samantha was working late at night at her office, all alone, when somebody tried to get into her locked office. It was not the killer, as Samantha feared, but Morgan's father, a resourceful psycho who resorted to climbing into the office through an exterior window high above the street, cat burglar style. This energetic pervert just wanted Sam to give a message to Morgan, a totally valueless message (he wants to see her!) that has no influence on either the Asgar plot nor the Morgan incest plot--Reed is just trying to get a cheap gratuitous scare in. And she tries to do it again when minutes later a second person comes looking for Samantha at her office--again it is not the killer but one of Ron's police colleagues, this doofus lets drop that Ron is married and does not even notice the broken window through which Morgan's dad entered the room.
Ron and Samantha may think the killer is behind bars, but of course J. J. knows better and conducts his own freelance investigation. He encounters Asgar and gets overwhelmed by the demon, who imprints the mark of the beast on him--a red welt with three tiny numerals on it--you know which nunerals! J.J.'s personality begins changing, and not for the better! After a lifetime of being a kindly celibate intellectual he starts evolving into a cruel horny TV-watcher obsessed with "jumping Samantha's bones!" (Reed's effort to portray this metamorphosis is another of her few ambitious strategies here in Demon Within.) When Garrett brings Samantha out to his mansion in the Hamptons, J. J. tags along, and contrives to watch Garrett and Sam have sex in the woods while taking a breather from trying to figure out the identity of the Satanist who is possessed by Asgar.
J. J. feels there are two suspects: Ron and Garrett. (Garrett also can see the murders in a dream-like state as they happen.) It becomes apparent that when Ron and Garrett were buddies like ten years ago, Garrett decided that a good way for them to become rich would be to summon Satan himself using candles and a pentagram and blood from a prostitute and the whole bit, taking advanrage of stuff he'd learned from J. J. (It turns out that teaching Garrett about Satan as part of the effort to to fight the Devil was like funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a means of developing defenses against coronaviruses.) Satan ended up paving the way for Garrett to get rich, but not Ron, but of course both of them end up paying a terrible price--one is now possessed by Asgar and the other gets the lesser punishment of just being forced to psychically witness Asgar's atrocities.
(It is funny to think that Ron murdered a prostitute to summon Mephistopheles and then just went on to become a homicide detective. I guess it takes a thief to catch a thief.)
In the final 75 or so pages of the novel all the plot threads are tied up. I was amazed to find that the Ramona the witch/Jeffrey the ghost plot and the Morgan the anorexic incest victim plot were resolved with so little connection to the Samantha plot. Ramona tries to summon her brother Max from Heaven because she thinks a fellow ghost will be a welcome companion for her nephew Jeffrey. Ramona's sorcery catches Asgar's attention and Asgar kills her. Even though she is a witch who makes a practice of summoning ghosts, Ramona goes straight to Heaven, but she doesn't like it there and convinces the heavenly bureaucracy to let her return to Earth to be with Jeffrey. She and Jeffrey decide to travel the world as ghosts, see Buckingham Palace and the Pyramids and so on. (I had expected Ramona's witchcraft and/or Jeffrey's ghostliness to somehow figure in the defeat of Asgar--I was wrong, the witch-ghost subplot is totally superfluous.)
As for Morgan, she returns to the apartment to find Samantha away. Her father busts in on her to prepare her for their wedding, making her wear sexy nightgowns and so forth. Morgan resigns herself to being her father's sex slave, thinking that her dad, some kind of super criminal, will kill fat bald Charlie if she calls for help. But then we get a diabli ex machina resolution to this plot thread. While Morgan is in the shower and her father is waiting for her in bed, Asgar busts into the apartment, I guess looking for Samantha; the monster kills perv Dad and carries off the body, liberating Morgan, who joins Charlie with whom she lives happily ever after.
The climax of the entire novel sees Garrett transform into skinless demon Asgar while having sex with Samantha; this drives her insane, and she retreats into a little girl personality and is positive that this is all a dream. Reed plays this for laughs--J. J. arrives moments after Asgar/Garrett impregnates Sam and the economist/exorcist engages in a spiritual battle with Asgar, complete with lightning bolts, and Samantha keeps remarking to herself that this dream is awesome and marveling that this dream has top notch special effects. Asgar/Garrett and J. J. vanish, doomed to be locked in psychic battle for all eternity in another dimension, and Ron arrives just in time to drag a dazed Sam out of the burning mansion. Earlier scenes had presented the possibility that Ron (the prostitute murderer) and Samantha might be able to get together because Ron's wife has decided to divorce Ron, but it is not to be. Sam is permanently deranged, and consigned to an insane asylum, where she will give birth to a demon baby (could Reed and Leisure Books have envisioned a sequel?) Ron is let go by the NYPD because he tells everybody the true story of Satanism and demonic possession he has been living through and they all conclude he is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, a diagnosis perhaps applicable to me for typing all this and even to you are if you've been reading this blog post through instead of just skipping to the end for the conclusion like you were trained to do in grad school.
I have found many of those 80's horror novels to be poorly written. Believe it or not, the books included in the Paperbacks from Hell series are the best of a bad lot. If it's not included in that series I try not to waste my time with books in that vein.
ReplyDeleteI think you have thoroughly broken this butterfly on the wheel.
ReplyDeleteMarzAat.
I never find a paperback from hell book well at a used book sale. How hard are they to come by?
ReplyDeleteGiving every character a backstory is just as bad as info dump. There are subtle ways to reveal something about a character without dump a whole backstory on them.
I was lucky to find this one; it was the only horror or SF book on a big table of romance and detective paperbacks.
DeleteI think Reed's main plot was a little thin, and she didn't know how to flesh it out, to give it twists and turns or additional depth, so she bulked up the book by giving each character a harrowing past, adding a whole library of little horror short stories to her book, each story representing a different horror sub-genre that pushed a particular button--anti-Semitism, rape, incest, death by fire, deal-with-the-devil, exorcism, etc.