The Demonologist

The Demonologist, written by Andrew Pyper, seeks to mix a horror story with the typical structure of a thriller while building an allegory on depression. The novel may contain a couple of exciting scenes, but its incoherent story is ultimately incapable of sustaining itself.

The novel’s protagonist is David Ullman, a university professor and specialist in the most famous work of the English poet John Milton: the epic poem Paradise Lost. Ullman’s marriage is in ruins, his job doesn’t bring the same satisfaction as before, and his best friend has just discovered she has terminal cancer. It’s to escape momentarily from his life, then, that he accepts the mysterious offer of a woman who calls him at work, and travels to Venice with his daughter Tess.

Ullman, however, doesn’t know the nature of the task for which he was hired – an obvious red flag he chooses to ignore – and, after arriving in the city, he witnesses a case of demonic possession, which he manages to record. But, as soon as he returns to the hotel, he sees his daughter – who, like him, suffers from depression – committing suicide by throwing herself from the top of the building. Believing that his daughter did not die, but was kidnapped by the Devil, the professor departs on a journey for answers and to get her back.

Depression is the backbone of The Demonologist. The events that form the narrative play an allegorical role regarding the illness the protagonist suffers: the horror scenes represent the invisible and mostly incomprehensible forces that push individuals to self-destructive actions, nourishing their pain while extending their dominion over them. The devil’s dynamic with Ullman functions as a reflection of his illness: it drives him away from his friends, isolates him from the world, and induces neurotic and suicidal behavior as it pushes the professor ever closer to the precipice. The dilemma at the climax, for example, is whether Ullman will surrender himself to the demon – which would lead to his death – or whether he will be able to resist his influence.

The Demonologist may have a good premise for a horror story – discussing a serious illness with the trappings of horror – but it squanders it at every turn.  First, the story confuses depression with stupidity, requiring the protagonist to perform completely insane actions to build any scene loaded with tension. At one point, for example, Ullman is traveling by car, running away from a demon who can take over other people’s bodies, and decides to give a strange girl a ride – a girl he saw changing her face seconds before. The situation doesn’t represent Ullman’s psychological state in any way: it is not the case that he recognizes the danger and yet desires it, or that he’s being drawn or lured to a bad situation by forces that he cannot control, or something along these lines. No, he just thinks giving that bizarre girl a ride is a good idea and he’s even surprised when she turns out to be a demon in disguise. The book is entirely made of similar situations, showing how its view on depression is superficial and foolish. Its allegory is repeated to exhaustion, too: all horror scenes in the narrative follow this same pattern, of Ullman doing something nonsensical to get in danger, bringing harm to himself.

To make matters worse, the novel fails to develop the disease from Ullman’s perspective. The Demonologist is narrated in the first-person, which could have made the reader enter the character’s mind and be immersed in a heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere – that is, if the book was better written. Here, however, the professor rarely shows internal signs of being depressive, more often than not he’s even cheerful and optimistic. And we are not talking about his external facade, as we have access to his innermost thoughts. His moments of sadness are always linked to his life’s tragedies, too: he suffers because his daughter died and because his best friend will soon share the same fate. He has no unmotivated moments of sorrow, when the person is suddenly enveloped by a stifling sense of hopelessness with no warning and is left feeling breathless, lost, and alone.  Even the moments of despair related to his personal losses are brief and not overwhelming. In short, the book explores little of the character’s depression.

Yes, right at the beginning of the second act, the professor tries to kill himself by taking medicine, but this is the only chapter in the book in which Ullman is immersed in self-deprecating and destructive thoughts. During the rest of the story, his mind is elsewhere, his thoughts are basic and superficial – rife with adverbs (“How terribly, unshakably frightened I am“) – and his voice in the narrative is not marked by the anguish it should have had.

Ullman is marked only by his obsession with finding his daughter and following the clues left by the Devil. It is these traits, not his depression, that most interfere with the events, and that can be observed in his actions and dialogues. Even his initial skepticism is not sufficiently developed as well, since the character, for obvious reasons, comes to believe in the Devil as soon as he observes the possession in Venice. Ullman is a shallow, flat, plot-driven character, very similar to those who serve as protagonists in Dan Brown’s novels – books of which The Demonologist copies the structure for much of its second act.

After his daughter’s fall, the professor begins to decipher clues left by the demon, hoping that, somehow, he will find her at the end of the trail. Because of this, much of the novel is formed by Ullman running from one place to another, similar to what happens in thrillers like Angels and Demons – but here it is much, much worse. There’s a scene where the demon possesses a taxi driver and takes Ullman to the north of a building called Dakota. The professor, then, in a moment of unusual brilliance, deduces that this means that he must travel to North Dakota. While in Dan Brown’s novels, the protagonist’s deductions are related to conspiracy theories and usually involve a minimum of research to exemplify the knowledge of the character, in The Demonologist, Ullman’s conclusions are just silly.

It is symptomatic that Ullman’s deep understanding of Paradise Lost is almost irrelevant to the narrative. The novel is incapable of working with Milton’s epic poem, limiting itself to having the demon quote it now and then, and making the professor analyze the quote superficially, picking out keywords. It is no wonder that the moment in which the demon finally demands just a little interpretation from Ullman, the professor confesses to be stumped: “I explain how I didn’t understand it at first, either. There was no word that jumped out as a destination, no city or state veiled by poetry.”

The novel at least fares a bit better when it comes to its horror scenes. Pyper crafts them with typical elements of the genre, providing information gradually, knowing that keeping the reader in the dark is effective in building tension. There’s a scene in a basement where the protagonist is trying to get information from Delia Reyes, a lady who lost her sister to the demon weeks before – a sister who talked to Ullman when he walked into the house. Delia is immersed in the darkness of the basement. The description of the place, then, focuses on the possible weapons in the environment, indicating the danger the professor is in: “When my feet make it to the floor, I can take in some of the details the light offers. Worktables against the walls, cluttered with tools, shears, Mason jars full of lugnuts and screws.” There are only two lamps sparingly illuminating the spot and they take turns flicking on and off. The dialogue with Delia, then, gradually sets the stage for the scene’s climax, revealing to Ullman the intentions of the demon and showing the horrific results of its influence.

It is a pity, then, that such moments must be always preceded by nonsensical decisions (such as going down the basement) and justified by almost humourous passages such as, “What was I thinking, trusting an old lady dirtied with blood and soil who’d just returned from a ten-day sojourn without knowing how she’d spent the time? An old woman with a gift for hearing things the rest of the world prays to never hear? A liar.” We have bad news, Ullman, we don’t know what you were thinking, either, we can’t help you there. He later reflects that he never trusted Mrs. Reyes and that going to the basement with her was indeed a desperate action on his part. However, here’s a lesson for life: recognizing the stupidity of one’s own actions is of no use when one keeps repeating them ad æternum.

The antagonist’s plan is a match to Ullman’s actions in terms of being nonsensical. The demon intends to use the professor to reveal himself to the world. In order to do so, he forces the professor to travel through the United States by following increasingly clumsy clues and experiencing cases of demonic possession. Even ignoring that there are much easier means to reach this goal (especially in the era of smartphones and Youtube), it is difficult to understand why Ullman is necessary to the plan, as the demon himself arranges the camera in Venice and orders a doctor to give it to the professor, when the demon could very well have ordered the doctor himself to film the possession. The excuse given – that Ullman, as an academic professor, has the credibility that random Youtubers do not possess – is eventually contradicted by the demon himself, who causes Ullman to destroy his own professional reputation during his quest for his daughter. Moreover, the demon himself seems to act against his goal when he tries to hide his trail in a way that only the professor can discover.

The motivations of another supporting character, referred to by the protagonist as “the Pursuer”, don’t make much sense either. They seem to change without any criteria, giving the impression that the concept of practicality is alien to the character, whose role in the story is only to justify the occasional chase sequence, where the Pursuer proves to be pretty inefficient at his job, being regularly beaten by a university professor.

Despite its ambitions, The Demonologist is a superficial and deeply flawed book. Some of its horror scenes are effective and the idea of building an allegory on depression is interesting, but the whole story is poorly planned, marred by nonsensical decisions and contradictions.

December 05, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on  September 21, 2015.