by Michael Laimo

Bev Mathers—an incongruously Puritanically named protagonist!—is an aging rocker who's just become something of a Billboard champ. Overnight, you might say, and against the odds. Turns out it wasn't all due to his own talent. When Bev's triumphant tour comes to an end, his life unravels as he begins to hear a voice in his head and (even creepier) feel a scratching inside his skull, as if someone's searching through a card catalogue in his brain. It doesn't take long before this supposedly stress-induced condition leads to seizures and worse. The still-grieving husband of a wife killed in a terrible accident now questions his own sanity, as well he should.

Dragged along on Bev's descent into madness are his unsympathetic manager, his rock journalist daughter, and a serious priest he meets at a party. Stalked by a sinister stranger and suddenly thrust into a mysterious encounter with a limo, Bev soon learns what his fate might be and what's happening to him. And how it might affect the world. Plans have been made, and he's become a pawn in the title character's unusual power gambit.

Interestingly, Laimo decides to mine a more Judeo-Christian framework for this novel than usual, offering a possibly new spin on the God-Satan relationship. From the nicely rendered opening set in the Negev Desert during the Six-Day War to the occult lectures of Father Danto, to the grimly hellish obscene visions into which Bev is drawn, the plot unfolds with plenty of paranoid dread and eventual gore. It bears the familiar echoes of The Exorcist, The Omen, To the Devil a Daughter, and even Rosemary's Baby, but these elements are handled with a kind of reverence. The mix is refreshing, if not completely original. The fun is in the reading, because as a requirement, the protagonist's not having any fun. Perhaps we just don't see enough of the old-fashioned occult trappings in modern horror.

Where The Demonologist falls somewhat short is in the climax, which—if this were a movie—we might complain is infused with way too much CGI. Laimo's subtlety gives way to Ed Lee-style excess, and the two approaches here seem to conflict. Despite this flaw, the novel is a well-executed riff on Satanic possession that retains Laimo's trademarks: an entertainingly effective sense of incipient insanity tinged with paranoia and testicle-crushing fear. And what more can we ask?