Demon TheoryAuthor: Jones, Stephen GrahamGenre: Horror Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Released: April 27, 2006 |
A Review by Mike Bracken
11/30/2006
It's only now, a decade after Scream and even longer since Schow made his observation, that I've finally found the exception to this almost iron-clad rule: Stephen Graham Jones' novel Demon Theory. Best described as "Scream in a novelized format", Demon Theory is a sublime examination of pop culture kitsch and genre film traditions that evokes comparisons to works by authors like Chuck Palahniuk and Michael Chabon as well as Craven's film series and Kevin Williamson's scripts (minus most of the Dawson's Creek-styled melodrama, fortunately). It's the rare work that manages to both entertain and enlighten—a well-told tale boasting the copious footnotes of a Master's Thesis in Media Studies. Even more amazing is that the footnotes are just as entertaining as the narrative...
The novel opens with a brief note mentioning that this is "Part 1 of a three part novelization of the feature film trilogy The Devil Inside"; Parts 2 and 3 (based on the second and third films, respectively) are also included. What follows is a scene-by-scene literary recreation of three feature films inspired by a real-life case. Written in a style that isn't quite a screenplay nor entirely a novel, the first few pages can be tough going (film jargon for various stage directions and shots are interspersed throughout the narrative to "recreate" what's happening on the screen). Once one adjusts, however, the true beauty of what Jones has created shines through.
What he's crafted is at once a love letter to the genre as a whole and to the hardcore fans who live and die for horror films, cult history, and the darker side of life in general. Being one of those people the book was almost assuredly written for, I found myself reading on giddily, poring over each new footnote with a maniacal sort of glee to see what the next homage was or who the next source might be (and imagine my absolute amazement at finding myself cited in reference to a review of Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street—it's always nice to know you're not writing in a vacuum). There will be people who find the footnotes distracting (and they can be—they pull the reader out of the narrative to the bottom of the page regularly—and some of them are so involved that there are footnotes to footnotes of footnotes, making it so there are more footnotes on the page than text), but the true cinephile and pop culture geeks will love them—and since that's clearly Demon Theory's target audience, I had no problem with them. If they truly bother you, read the story then go back through the footnotes. Don't skip them, though—a lot of the genius of this work is hidden in the minutiae.
Covering things as diverse as the old TV show Manimal to the stylings of Dario Argento and managing to keep it all scholarly (and more importantly, accurate) is no small feat. Get one thing wrong and the geeks are gonna find it—but Jones has done his homework and I didn't notice a single thing that seemed wrong or off in all of the footnotes featured. Not only can the man write, he's clearly a great researcher as well. More impressive still is that reading the various asides actually taught me things I didn't know.
Broken up into three major "sections" (one for each of the three films—another apparent nod to Craven and Williamson, who insisted Scream was planned as a trilogy from the moment he started the first script... whether this is true or not remains open to debate), the book occasionally feels like three novels in one. And like all film trilogies, some installments are better than others. Here, the first is arguably the weakest, while the third and final stands out as the best. This isn't to say that the first portion of the book is somehow weaker than the rest—just that the first "film" spends a lot of time setting up the characters and mythology while the second and third can just run right into the action.
Perhaps the most amazing thing of all is that Jones has crafted these three "films" completely from scratch, and managed to shape them in a way that he gets all of his various footnotes to fit in naturally with the flow of his prose. On one hand, writing the source material for your footnotes seems pretty easy—you just make the characters say, do, or find themselves in situations wherein the author can make the asides he chooses. However, this is a much more difficult act to pull off than it first appears. A certain degree of finesse is required to fit in all these footnotes without making the characters sound like talking puppets designed solely to forward the author's agenda. Jones stays well away from this potential pitfall—creating a cast of savvy characters who talk like they might have popped out of a Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino film, but never cross over into the land of caricature. In a lesser novelist's hands, the footnotes and asides would have seemed gimmicky; in Jones', it seems both natural and strangely brilliant.
Honestly, I could spend all day talking about Demon Theory. It's easily one of the best horror novels I've read in the past decade as it seamlessly mixes monsters and human frailty with a thorough dissertation on horror as a genre and pop culture in general. The academicazation of horror may indeed be a yawnfest, but Demon Theory proves there are exceptions to every rule.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 11/30/2006
