Ex Libris: Hell on Earth

I admit I was exaggerating earlier when I said I haven't finished my current reading list.

That is, what I meant is that I won't be able to post reviews of books I've read at the moment. However, that won't stop me from posting reviews of books I've already read some time ago.

So to put the spotlight on SFF (or in this case, horror) books that have been overlooked by Joe Public, here's John Shirley's Demons:

It's amazing what you can get used to. That was a platitude; now it summarizes life for everyone. It means something powerful now. People can get used to terrible privation, to famine, to war, to vast and soulless discount stores. Some got used to prison; some got used to living alone on mountaintops. But now.

This morning I saw a choleric-looking, pop-eyed sort of a middle-aged man in a threadbare suit stop his huffing old Volvo at a street corner, look about for cross traffic, accelerate slowly to creep across the intersection-- the traffic lights, of course, not having worked for a long time, not through the whole north of the state. And one of the demons turned the street to soft hot tar, the demon rising up, howling, from the stuff of the street itself, rows of fangs in the creature's absurdly big jaws gleaming and dripping. The demon was one of the Grindum clan-- giant grasshopper legs, insectile heads with just enough human about them to sicken: curling horns, big grinding jaws that move sideways or at an angle or revolve on their skulls like an owl's head on its shoulders. The Grindum swam in the hot asphalt with a conventional freestroke, humming some tune.

The Volvo began to sink in the steaming asphalt. The driver merely got a good grip on his briefcase, opened the car door, used the door handle for a ladder run, ran along the roof of the the car to the hood, and jumped to the curb. Landing rather neatly, he continued on his way, not even looking back, hurrying only a little.

Fascinating passage, no? That's the opening sequence of Demons, Shirley's take of Hell on Earth.

In actuality, Demons is really two-novelletes in one. The first part, Demons, relates the first demonic attack; the second part, Undercurrents, relate what happened to the world nine years after the first invasion. However, it is the first part of Demons that is the strongest and is the basis of my recommendation of this book.

In a near-future that's almost indistinct from the present, several races of nightmarish demons have descended on the world to wreak massive havoc and bloodthirsty slaughter. There is no stopping the creatures and the only thing that keeps survivors going is the simple fact there are more humans than there are demons.

As viewed through the eyes of a young artist from San Francisco, Shirley details in fascinating exactness the world's response to the invasion--panic, denial, and sometimes painful collaboration.

What's more, Shirley creates a horrific bunch of not one, not two-- but seven kinds (or 'clans') of demons to flesh out the demonic mythology he's introducing here. For example, the passage above noted the Grindum, akin to a grasshopper with a human head except the head has ram's horns and big grinding jaws.

Other examples are: the Sharkadians, female bodies that can fly complete with hands, feet and lots of teeth and the Dishrags, furry rags as big as Volkswagens that can crush a human both literally and a little with psychic/ metaphysical/ quantum continuum disruption.

And have I mentioned all seven kinds of demons are psychotically and sadistically homidical?

Unfortunately, despite the fantastic first part, Shirley goes through the Eastern mysticism route in the last half of the story that doesn't really work for me. Still, like Richard Matheson's classic tale I Am Legend, the good parts of the story outweigh the bad and Shirley ends Demons on a thrilling note.

In Undercurrents, Shirley combines paranoia against corporations, Lovecraftian out-of-the-body experiences, scenes straight out from Dawn of the Dead and demon possession to craft a sequel to Demons.

Nine years after the first story, the horror of the demon invasion has passed and Shirley gleefully expounds how people manage to block the experience from their minds to the point of calling it a 'mass hallucination.' However, to paraphrase the old saying, those who forget the past have a tendency to repeat it.

The Amazon.com review states that Demons deals with "Themes of wakefulness and sleep--the struggle for self-awareness against the deliberate denial of what's happening around us--form the counterpoint for the terrifying and often brutal events of the story."

More to the point, in Shirley's website, the author is wary of the evils present in the modern world and constantly sounds the alarm against it. And it is in these evils that Shirley mines his ideas for his stories: the little, everyday horrors transformed into the mythical demons of our past.

Except that-- he elaborates to the point of almost being preachy sometimes-- horrors are still horrors, however we look at them.