Demon: A Memoir (Reviewed by Me, Read by You)

As you know, I don't rank works of literature, however, I can name only about a score of major modern* works that really matter: Beowulf, Don Quixote, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet and Henry V, Canterbury Tales if you must. In the 20th Century, I've read a few great tales - The Wasteland, the Lord of the Rings, Perelandra, The Great Divorce, The Violent Bear it Away, Ficciones, the Name of the Rose, and The Secret History.

So, there you have it. This reader's noted great works first saw print, with the exception of Tart and Eco, well before my birth. Because it has been 15 years or so since the last straggler (Donna Tart's The Secret History) made it through the arch, I had lulled myself into thinking that my personal canon of great works was closed.

I am an idiot.

One of the greatest perils of postmodern thought is postmodern ideology, which carries an inherent risk: the risk that qualities such as good and bad, important and irrelevant, will be drained of meaning. Eventually, only the "personal" matters, and, eventually, not even that. I must have fallen in line with this quiet assumption at some point, because otherwise I cannot explain the shock I experienced when Demon: A Memoir appeared in my mailbox through what I can only describe as a series of unusual circumstances.

Let me get to the point: Tosca Lee's Demon: A Memoir is great literature, and being such, will very likely be misunderstood (at best) or overlooked (at worst) for another 30 years or so.

Me and the followers of the only way worship the Word, so it has always baffled me as to why we are, generally, so incapable of writing well. Eliot, L'Engle, O'Connor and Lewis are, of course, among many examples to the contrary, but there is a lot of Christian literature that can't even get the prose right, much less the theme. Demon: A Memoir is a new exception to that general tendency.

The plot structure is that of an architect's, the characters are vivid, the writing expresses clarity, wit, realism and logophilia. The book has three extraordinary characters that I'll be able to name on my deathbed. The climax is taut and spectacular. If Tosca Lee ripped out her own heart, I think words would come pouring from the wound.

This is a brave book - one that very humbly ventures into darkness with a candle.

Let me bypass a synopsis in favor of persuasion. I'll give you three reasons to pick this book up through a scene, an artifice, and an element of pathos:

A scene: The recently divorced protagonist, Clayton, is approached by, and drawn to, a beautiful woman in a bookstore. Lee masterfully negotiates a vulnerable man's complex lusts without ever once relying on cultural myths of manhood. Clay's emotions towards her come from a good place, a desire for the comforts and companionship of a wife, and quickly distort into more complex, and less pure desires.

An artifice: I love mis en abyme, when done well. The play-within-a-play in Hamlet, the book-within-a-book in The Name of the Rose, the poet-within-a-poem of Eliot, are all flawlessly executed. I'm a sucker for them, but I also know that they can be a trap, tempting the author to pull the trick once too often (a fate that befell the great artiste of our generation, Michael Jackson, when he turned the spectacular Thriller into a movie within a dream, or vice versa, or something.) The 70s film They Might Be Giants was brilliant mis en a byme, but had to bail on the ending to avoid the myriad traps that the story-within-a-story structure. Demon: A Memoir, shamelessly goes for mis en abyme, and delivers. In spades.

Demon not only is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, but it is also a Truth-Within-the-Lie-Within-the-Truth story. Not only that, but it makes subtle reference to the conceit with overt references to John Gardner's Grendel and even, of all things, Sesame Street's infamous "Monster at the End of This Book."

The pathos: I know demons. I've seen their handiwork (so have you). Even as a weak and vain bridge-troll, I know my charge: to wrestle against principalities and powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, and the rulers of darkness. Somehow, like the unconsolable wailing of Esau over the unfairness of the loss of his birthright to his deceptive younger brother Jacob, the demon Lucian, with craft, earnestness and emotion, quickly earns my sympathy with his account of the Cosmic Disaster, even though I know that he too abandoned his own birthright for even less than a trifle.

Lee must be crazy or brilliant to try to pull this off. Just because it works flawlessly doesn't mean she isn't crazy. Van Gogh cut his own ear off, you know.

Are you getting the impression that I liked the book yet? Go buy it, already, for God's sake. And yours, too.

Post Scriptum - I have noticed two somewhat prevalent comparisons among commentators that don't quite jive with me.

There are a few references in other places to the work as being derivative of Anne Rice's Interview with A Vampire, but this is error. Lee's novel displays an episodic structure that has greater kinship with Stoker's Dracula, and though the villain is certainly sympathetic, he is no less a villain. Why do people think Demon is like Interview? Uhm, I guess because it has an interview in it, I don't really know. Trust me, Demon has a far greater sense of creeping dread, malevolence and power than Rice's Lestat-as-Superman saga (Don't get me wrong, IwaV is a good book, but isn't similar to Demon in any important or thematic way). I guess by this logic, Les Miserables is derivative of The Music Man, because, uh, they're both plays.

Also, Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis' demonic parody is delightful and full of insight and encouragement. Demon: A Memoir aims at a much different target. Lucian has much more in common with one of my favorite figures in literature, Lewis's Professor Weston in Perelandra, than he does with the master's more famous work about the corporate inner workings of hell.

A better book to compare Demon: A Memoir to is Stoker's Dracula. The full story emerges through obfuscation and deceptive trails, through a variety of voices and media (where Stoker utilized telegrams and letters, Lee takes advantage of text messages, calendar reminders, e-mail, cell phones) and centers around an evil that takes most of the book to fully appear. Although Lee is a better writer than Stoker, both Demon and Dracula share the same attention to layering.

Post Post Scriptum - If none of this has encouraged you to pick up Demon: A Memoir, here's one last-ditch effort: if you liked Lois Lowry's The Giver, Rice's The Vampire Lestat, the aforementioned The Great Divorce or Perelandra, King's The Eyes of the Dragon (or, for different reasons, The Shining), Borges' The Library of Babel, Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories, Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Inferno or Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, you are probably going to enjoy Tosca Lee's debut novel.

*You do recall my somewhat broad definition of "modern" don't you? Everything following 601 and the baptism of King Aethelbert. The brief thousand-year-or-so period before that is the Classical, and before that, the Ancient. Suck it up if you don't like it. Keep things simple, I say.