Aardvarchaeology

Daryl Gregory has published a number of very good short stories over the past few years, notably a few science fiction pieces based on neuropsychiatry. So I was very keen to read his first novel, Pandemonium (Ballantine/Del Ray 2008). Genrewise it's modern fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a world much like ours where certain things happen that appear to be magical. As a consequence, the course of post-WW2 US history is different at some points.

The central fantastical idea in the novel is that humanity is haunted by a number of disembodied spirits that can possess people. Each spirit has its own trademark behaviour and often prefers people with certain characteristics, and so they can be recognised and given names. When a person becomes possessed by such a "demon", such as on the book's first page, people around wonder "Which demon is it this time?". For instance there's the "Angel of Death", which possesses little girls, dresses the possessed body up in a white night gown and prowls hospital wards of the terminally ill, delivering an apparently magical kiss of death to inmates. Each demon can only occupy one body at a time. They rarely stay for long in one body. I'm not sure if they can "exist" without a human body. It may be that every demon is constantly possessing someone on the planet and playing out its built-in scenario repeatedly without pause. In one scene, a demon jumps instantly from one man to another in a group attacking its original body of a few days past and knocks them all out.

The book tells of a man who was possessed by a demon at age five and has suffered strange psychiatric problems since. We follow him as he tries a last-ditch effort to get help, and as a consequence ends up having violent adventures over a period of about two weeks. Many winks and nods to fans of genre fiction and comics. It's a pretty good novel, though to my taste it suffers from pacing problems. The main characters do far too much gratuitous travelling to and fro, and I sometimes got impatient. This criticism is of course a bit of a compliment in itself since it shows that I cared about what was going to happen next. And pacing is a difficult part of the novelist's art since it's hard to read your own prose as if you didn't know what was coming. But still, this novel is not as good as Daryl Gregory's best short stories. But I'm looking forward to his second one, The Devil's Alphabet, due out in November!

[More blog entries about books,, review,, darylgregory; böcker, läsning, recension, darylgregory.]