July 7, 2024

Fighting the devil again huh? That's cool

Swatting at the devil with a broom like he's a raccoon trying to get my study snack

Look sometimes in literature the concept of the devil is a metaphor of man’s internal struggle, or a symbol of the darkness that lies in the depths of humanity. And then sometimes in literature the devil is a literal guy that sucks and you get in a slap fight with in the Wendy’s parking lot. This newsletter is about the Wendy’s kind.

The funniest thing about this book. Ok no back up. One of the funniest things about this book is that the primary suspect for a series of murders on a boat is a devil. The funniest thing is how often they are using the construction “a devil.” As in: “Do you believe in devils;” “It looks like a devil has been in here;” “This particular devil has for some reason decided to call himself Old Tom and we should respect it and call him that even if Old Tom is such a funny name for a devil to insist on being called and makes him sound like a goat in a fable about sharing.” Having been raised garden-variety Christian I’ve only ever heard “Devil” used to refer to that singular one, proper noun, who lives under the earth’s crust and dreams up new subscription pricing models for stuff that used to be free, so the idea of the world of The Devil and the Dark Water being one where they’re just batting away devils on the regular was so funny to me.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts takes place on the Western Front during WWI, following an injured combat nurse and (SPOILER ALERT. Don’t keep reading if you don’t want this thing spoiled for you Ok I warned you) her soldier brother, presumed dead in a shelling but who is actually alive and crawling through No Man’s Land with a German soldier he got trapped with and who (EVEN MORE SPOILERS) he thinks is kind of sexy. Both of them, at different points of peril, come across a mysteriously intact hotel among the shelled-out ruins of the battlefields, full of laughter and quaffing and run by a top hat-wearing fiddler who promises Everything One Desires. You know what I actually can’t remember if Katherine Arden wrote if he wears a top hat but he really gives slimy mustachioed top hat vibes. Anyway in some respects the fiddler and his hotel are a metaphor for dissociation; those wearied by the horrors of the war find themselves slipping away in front of the hotel’s magic mirror while drinking their way into oblivion. But in other ways the fiddler is just a guy who keeps popping up places to make everything worse and get people to tell him gossip and, again, may very well wear a top hat. I don’t know if you can tell but I loved this book.

Camp Damascus will probably make return appearances in this newsletter because there are so many things about it to appreciate, but for this issue’s purposes what you need to know is that the titular camp is a religious-affiliated conversion camp that uses… demon technology? to summon a biblical demon that will follow you around and make sure you aren’t doing gay stuff. This is obviously way darker and more scary than I’m making it sound for this dumb little newsletter entry but a detail the author (anonymous and operating under the pen name Chuck Tingle) included was that each of these demons wear a corporate-looking red polo with a name tag on it, I guess to maintain a veneer of professionalism. It’s this kind of banality on top of the cruelty that makes it so bone-chilling and it’s a detail I still think about all the time.

Ok. This one is going to involve some spoilers. So I’ve kindly prepared a spoiler-free sentence for you to consume if you want to leave it at that and read Lone Women with untainted eyes: Adelaide has been saddled with a Terrible Secret that follows her around and ruined her life and potentially killed her whole family.

Ok get out of here because here’s the spoiler version:

Adelaide has been saddled with a big-ass, ravenous demonic dragon who is also her sister and is named Elizabeth, who has gotten loose and is probably looking for revenge for being locked in a trunk for most of her life. They have a lot of sibling issues to work through including the fact that she is a big murderous dragon. It’s complicated. Also all of this is taking place in the 19th century Wild West for some added flavor.