9. Pandemonium

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!