The Demonologist

The Demonologist, written by Andrew Pyper, seeks to put mix a horror story with the typical structure of a thriller while building an allegory on depression. The novel contains a number of exciting scenes, but the author’s inability to put together a cohesive and coherent narrative results in a precarious story that is incapable of sustaining itself.

The Demonologist is divided into three acts. The first presents the characters and exposes the plot’s central conflict, the second is composed of a journey through the United States, and the last contains the climax of the story. The novel’s protagonist is called David Ullman, a university professor specialized 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 that she has terminal cancer. To escape momentarily from his life, then, he accepts the mysterious offer of a woman who calls him at work. The professor, even though he doesn’t know the nature of the task for which he was hired, travels to Venice taking his daughter Tess with him.

Arriving in the city, the protagonist is witness to a case of demonic possession, which he manages to record. When 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. Ullman, however, believes his daughter did not die, but was kidnapped by the Devil, and departs on a journey for answers to get her back.

Depression is the backbone of The Demonologist. The events that form the narrative play an allegorical role about the illness the protagonist suffers: the horror scenes represent the invisible and 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 himself from the world, and induces neurotic and suicidal behavior as it guides the professor closer to its claws. 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, therefore, has an excellent premise for a horror story – a premise that Pyper, however, is not able to work with.

First, the author confuses depression with stupidity, making the protagonist perform completely insane actions in order to create scenes 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. Such a decision is governed by nothing other than mere foolishness. 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, of being attracted to the situation by forces that he cannot understand, or something along these lines. No, he just thinks giving the 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, leading the reader to believe that Pyper’s view on the disease is superficial and foolish, mainly because it consists of an allegory repeated to exhaustion: all horror scenes in the narrative follow this same pattern, leading to the conclusion that the story has nothing more to say on the subject.

This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that Pyper doesn’t develop the disease from Ullman’s perspective. The Demonologist is narrated in the first-person, which could make the reader enter the character’s mind and be enveloped by a heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere, devoid of hope. However, the professor rarely shows internal signs of being depressive, and there are plenty of situations in which he even reveals a very optimistic view of things. His moments of sadness are always linked to his life’s tragedies: he suffers because his daughter died and because his friend will share the same fate. He has no moments of sorrow without motivation, and even those related to his losses are brief and not overwhelming. In short, Pyper explores little of the character’s disease.

Of course, 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 – what the author tries to hide by filling them with adverbs (“How terribly, unshakably frightened I am“) – and his voice in the narrative doesn’t have the anguish that it should have had.

After all, Ullman is, in fact, marked only by his obsession with finding his daughter and following the clues left by the Devil. It is this trait, not his depression, that most interferes with the events, and that can be observed in his actions and dialogues. 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. And if, in a particular scene, he confesses that he doesn’t yet believe in God, such information doesn’t serve any purpose at all, since this belief doesn’t interest the Devil very much. Ullman is, therefore, a shallow and flat character, very similar to those that 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 the Ullman running from one place to another, similar to what happens in thrillers like Angels and Demons.

Pyper, however, doesn’t show the same skill as Dan Brown when it comes to preparing the elements of this type of quest. In one of the first scenes of the second act, for example, 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 simply stupid.

It is symptomatic that Ullman’s knowledge on Paradise Lost is almost irrelevant to the narrative. Pyper is incapable of working with Milton’s epic poem, only making the demon quote it, and the professor analyze those quotes superficially. It is no wonder that the moment in which the demon demands a little more interpretation from Ullman – even if it is personal and doesn’t involve a deep analysis of the work – the character presents a lot of difficulties in performing the task: “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 author, however, definitely fares better in building horror scenes. Pyper develops them with typical elements of the genre and the narration provides this information gradually, knowing that keeping the reader in the dark is effective to build tension. The scene in a basement at the middle of the book is a good example: the protagonist is trying to get information from Delia Reyes, a lady who lost her sister to the demon weeks before – a sister that talked to Ullman when he walked into the house. Delia is immersed in the darkness of the basement. The description of the place shows possible weapons, indicating the danger he 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 still 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 results of its influence.

Therefore, it is a pity that such moments are preceded by absurd decisions (such as going down to the basement) and laughable 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.” After all, if the protagonist himself doesn’t know what he was thinking, imagine the reader. It is true that Ullman then reflects that he never trusted Mrs. Reyes and that it was indeed a desperate action on his part. However, recognizing the stupidity of one’s own actions is of no use when one keeps repeating them ad æternum.

Equally incoherent is the antagonist’s plan. The demon intends to use the professor to reveal himself to the world. In order to do so, he forces Ullman 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 case. The excuse given – that Ullman, as an academic professor, has the credibility that random Youtubers do not possess – is eventually destroyed by the demon himself, who causes Ullman to destroy his own image during his quest for his daughter. Moreover, the demon also contradicts his own intentions, showing to be more and more dedicated in hiding his traces in a way that only the professor can discover.

The motivations of another supporting character, called by the protagonist as “the pursuer”, don’t make any more sense. They seem to change without any criteria, giving the impression that the concept of practicality is alien to the character. The role of the pursuer in the story is only to motivate chase scenes, and the pursuer himself proves to be a pretty inefficient killer since they are regularly beaten by a university professor.

Despite its ambitions, The Demonologist is a superficial and deeply flawed book. Its horror scenes are effective and the idea of building an allegory on depression is interesting. Nevertheless, its plot is badly planned, containing a lot of holes, contradictions, and stupid decisions, which, in the end, all lead to a problematic and forgettable story.

December 05, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on  September 21, 2015.