**SPOILERS** FOR THE EYES OF DEMON READERS ONLY ** SPOILERS
Please keep in mind that you aren't even supposed to be reading this. No humans allowed. I only stuck this journal on the internet so I didn't lose it under a sandwich or something. Spoilers are a rotten thing, but sometimes it becomes impossible to write about the more complex points of the novel without them. So stop reading. Not that you should have been reading even this.
The memoir is not of a demon, but of an editor at a mid-sized publishing house and his interaction with a demon. There is a point in the story where it seems unclear whether the memoir will be contracted for publication.
So, clearly, there were other hands that reversed this course. How would the memoir read from someone who knew Clay, helped to get it published, but never had any evidence that what he saw was real? I wonder if Clay's publisher promoted the book as the diary of a madman, a straight memoir or as fiction (and attributed it to Tosca Lee?)
I can't remember the term for a sequel that is a parallel to another character's experience (as opposed to subsequent to that experience) but if there's a sequel to Demon in the works, I'd love to see Religious Madness (An Inquiry into the Mysterious Events Surrounding the Publication of Demon: A Memoir). I'd love to see Demon retold from a complete skeptic's point of view, someone who has to choose blindness by the end of the retelling instead of admission.
It would make a great faux documentary, too.
In the Aspern Papers, Henry James recounts a gripping tale of a would-be biographer's attempts to wrest private letters of a famed dead poet (Jeffrey Aspern) from his estate. The book cuts into the heart of the agents of public exposure, and the lengths people will go to either maintain their privacy or capitalize on their experiences in public. As I read Demon, I found new parallels to James' classic novel, and I can't help but wonder: how much of Clay's exhaustion-driven, depression scarred, demon haunted memory made it to the page. How much of what he wrote made it to publication? Did his editors posthumously alter the story in anyway?
Who ensures the publication? The Lord? Or Lucian?
This book posseses my mind with holy fire. I aproach it with the obsession of Roy Batty in Blade Runner:
Questions. Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?
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