Daryl Gregory's first novel Pandemonium boldly gives new life to an idea
that might seem more suited to comics, film and TV shows than to thoughtful SF
or fantasy: ordinary people transformed when possessed by "demons" that may be
avatars from the collective unconscious. This strange plague, which began in the
1950s, isn't limited to a handful of incipient superheroes and villains but can
strike anyone, anywhere, and then (if they're lucky) move on to another victim.
As a child, first-person narrator Del Pierce was possessed by the Hellion, "a
Dennis the Menace, a Spanky, a Katzenjammer Kid" that only afflicts boys between
the ages of four and nine, turning them into incorrigible pranksters,
"scampering brats with Woody Woodpecker laughs." After long sessions with a
shrink, that demon was apparently exorcised and Del went on to live a normal
life—as normal as any life can be in this alternate America where some unholy
mixtures of medieval demons, Jungian psychological concepts, and comic book
characters are running rampant. ("Best guess, there were perhaps a hundred
distinct strains—a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons.")
A few of them turn adult victims into killing machines in the service of Truth
or "good wars" (The Captain), or entirely chaotic impulses, while others are
more eccentric and seem unique to the 20th century where they arose. Deranged
individuals may invent their own pseudo-demons, though it's not always easy to
distinguish them from the real thing. There's some doubt about Valis, the
voluble and rather donnish personality that took over a formerly druggy and
stroke-damaged writer named Philip back in '82, restoring both speech and
health. (Between this book, Disch's The Word of God, and several movies,
Philip K. Dick seems to have become a full-blown avatar by now.)
What usually doesn't occur is a re-possession by one's original demon,
still less a reawakening that leaves it "quarantined" to one corner of the mind
and trying futilely to escape, yet that's what happens to Del after a car crash
that leaves him with other odd mental symptoms. Once he has physically
recovered, he begins a desperate investigation of the symptoms and possible
origins of his new state, along with the whole phenomenon that has been
variously ascribed to "aliens and archetypes and asuras, psychosis and psionics,
hellfire and hallucinations."
As academics and obsessives futilely debate, avatar fandoms develop and
religions come up with their own varied responses to the whole thing. "Most
Anabaptist strains of Protestantism incorporated possession into their theology,
and quite a few used the disorder on both ends of the equation: demons could
take you, true, but so could Jesus." It has already had a larger effect on
history. One example, mentioned in passing as Del pores through old government
records: "If Nixon's Secret Service guys hadn't taken their boss out in '74,
he'd probably still be president and the internment camps would still be open."
Whatever the changes, Gregory's alternate world is as thoroughly American as Jo
Walton's is British. And despite all those archeytpes, it's as full of
individuals—emotional, inconsistent, inexplicable even to themselves—as
Moffett's books, with their bedrock sense of "real life."
Pandemonium pays sometimes impish homage to a variety of sources (as the final
notes and Acknowledgments point out), but also manages to be moving and quite
memorable in its own right.