by Daryl Gregory
Pandemonium (2008) is another work of fiction
recommended by Paul Tremblay in his afterword for A Head Full of Ghosts.
Although it has an interesting twist on demon possession, Pandemonium isn’t
just horror though, it’s a dystopic, supernatural-psychological
mystery thriller.
In the world of Pandemonium, demonic
possession has spread all over the globe like a viral pandemic since WW2. “Ordinary men, women, and children are seized by
entities that seem to spring from the depths of the collective
unconscious—pop-culture avatars that some call demons.”
Like a virus, there are different
“strains” of demons that prefer certain types of hosts. For example, the Little Angel prefers pretty little girls.
..Experts
agree it was the Painter strain of the disorder. (Those were the official
terms—strain, disorder—as if marrying a medieval word like possession
with more medical and modern-sounding partners tamed the idea, boxed it up into
something tidy enough for science.) Best guess, there were perhaps a
hundred distinct strains—a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons.
The CDC recorded over twenty thousand cases of possession a year in the US,
some lasting weeks and most lasting only minutes. Some people were hit
repeatedly, as if struck by lightning charged them for life. Most of the time
they were seized by the same demon, but sometimes it was a different one every
time.
The government hastened to add that the reports contained an unknown number of
false positives, false negatives, incorrect diagnoses. Demons left behind no
DNA, no wake of antibodies in the bloodstream, no cellular changes in the
brain. A possession—especially a brief, one-time possession—was easy to
hide and easier to fake. Different people were highly motivated to do either.
Demons could make you do awful things—but awful things could make you famous.
Possession survivors showed up on TV all the time.
As a boy, Del Pierce was possessed by a
wild, destructive demon known as Hellion.
With unending patience from his family, the demon seemed to have
disappeared, and Del grew up into a fairly well-adjusted adult, until he got
into a car accident. Then he starts
experiencing these intermittent black outs and he begins to suspect that the
demon is still lurking inside him, lying dormant until Del’s head injury jolted it awake again.
My own
demon’s name caught my eye, in a paper called “Expanding the Post-War Cohort: A
Bayesian Analysis of Incident Reports, 1944-50.” …Everybody knew that the big
three—the Kamikaze, the Captain, and the Truth—had all appeared around the same
time. The paper was arguing that several more ought to be included: Smokestack
Johnny, the Painter, the Little Angel, some demon named the Boy Marvel, and my
own Hellion… What did it matter? I imagined bearded guys all over academia
working themselves into a lather over this, precisely because the stakes were
so low.
When a world-renowned scientist claims
to have a cure for demonic possession, Del asks his brother to accompany him as
he seeks out Dr Ram at a science conference.
But before Dr Ram can even agree to anything, he’s killed by someone who
was possessed by a demon known as The Truth.
Del then later meets a man named Valis, who’s also attending the
conference, and described as “an entity possessing the science fiction writer
formerly known as Philip K. Dick.”
More importantly, Del meets Mariette
O’Connell, an Irish nun who was once possessed by The Little Angel as a child,
who proves to be the most instrumental person in helping Del find out what is happening
with him. I couldn’t help but envision a thirty-something Sinead O’Connor
in that role.
…But Jesus,
what a relief! O’Connell just might be as fucked up as I was. All the
things about her that kept me off balance: the costume changes form high priest
to rock chick; the sudden lurches into hard Irish aints and yes; the abrupt
swing from pastor to sexual aggressor and back again. She didn’t know who the
hell she was, kick-ass exorcist or shell-shocked possession survivor.
Mariette leads the Pierce brothers to
the Human League, an organization that believes powerful telepaths are secretly
in charge of the planet, and who have the ability to possess people for their
own entertainment and advancement. The Human Leaguers agree to help Del figure
out whether a demon has been trapped inside him all these years.
As the story progresses, there was some
really nice, subtle world-building with sprinkles of playfulness and clever pop
culture references thrown in. The main narrative is intermittently broken
up by a “Demonology” chapter containing an anecdote about each of the primary
demons: the Captain, the Truth, Smokestack Johnny, The Little Angel, and
the Boy Marvel.
Eventually, Del and Mariette discover a
lead (can’t remember the details) that leads them to an abandoned farmhouse in
the middle of nowhere. A clue at the house leads them to an old man at a nearby
hospital. And of course, there’s a juicy
twist as we discover who this old man really is.
Basically, the twist is this:
During the 1940’s, there was a boy who
lived in that farmhouse, who didn’t realize at the time that he was a powerful
telepath. He was obsessed with comic books,
and when he had an accident that left him completely paralyzed, perhaps even stuck
with locked-in syndrome, the boy had no outlet and unleashed his fervent imagination
out into the world. So these entities
weren’t “demons”, they were characters sprung from the mind of a boy, yet with
no corporeal physicality. Yet instead of
hopping from one body to another, the entity known as Hellion decided to stay
inside the boy named Del Pierce. And eventually,
this entity became more human the longer he stayed. His family took this as progress and never
questioned that maybe Del was not really Del.
The “demon” who had been trying to get out was actually the real Del
Pierce, who had been trapped in limbo all these years.
At some point, Del realizes that Valis
is also a demon who had permanently taken possession of Philip K. Dick. Del and Valis proceed to have this crazy
conversation that explains everything.
This is for my own reference, so don’t read this passage if you’re
planning on reading Pandemonium!
"….An old
man. He’d been paralyzed almost his whole life. He had an accident back
in the forties, when he was eleven or twelve.”
“The golden age
of science fiction,” Valis said.
“He was the
source,” I said. “For some of the demons, at least. My cohort. We
were all—I don’t know—stories. Characters. He made us up and then sent us into
the world.”
… “There are
some humans who have a gift… Call them whatever you like. Your old man was one,
Phil another. Who knows how many are out there? Thousands at least. At this
moment, some teenage Japanese girl is pouring over a manga, a Hindu boy is
praying Shiva to life. These sensitives are a little closer to the boundaries.
Their grip on the consensual world is a little tenuous.”
“You
mean they’re crazy.”
He
shrugged. “Let’s not debate cause and effect. All we know is that when death
comes for them, when the darkness calls, some of them do not go gentle. They
refuse to be pulled in, and so they pull something back out.”
“The
demons.”
“Us,”
Valis said. “You’re going to have to learn to accept what you are.”
“Which
is what—aliens? Archetypes?”
“I
don’t yet know… You and I are special.
We outgrew our prescribed roles… We stayed too long. As soon as we began
to covet the lives we’d interrupted, we began to move beyond monomania, beyond
the pasteboard personalities we’d been given…”
All in all, I really enjoyed Pandemonium
– a fantastic idea that was more than competently executed!
