The demonizing of America. In Daryl Gregory’s Pandemonium that phrase
isn’t a euphemism for a propaganda attack or a metaphor for changing social
conditions; it’s the literal description of what has happened in the country
since the end of World War II. In the alternate reality depicted in this highly
enjoyable first novel, demonic possession is a fact of life. But these aren’t
the demons familiar to most of us from Dante and other visions of a hellish
underworld; instead they are creatures from American pop culture consciousness.
There’s The Captain, who emerges to lead brave, self-sacrificing soldiers into
battle; Smokestack Johnny, the engineer on a runaway train; the Little Angel,
whose touch brings a merciful death to her victims; and Truth, the demon who
hunts down and takes revenge on those who have profited from lies.
As a young boy, Del Pierce was possessed by the Hellion, a supreme mischief
maker who comes off as a deadly version of Dennis the Menace. Years of therapy
(unsurprisingly, Jungians are ascendant in this particular version of America)
seemed to leave Del cured and able to lead a normal life. Now, though, Del has
begun to suspect that the Hellion was never really driven out of his mind, but
instead buried deep and walled off into his subconscious. And the Hellion is now
fighting to get back out and regain control of Del’s mind.
The plot of Pandemonium thus becomes Del’s quest to understand his
possession and fight off the Hellion’s re-emergence. That quest will lead him to
confront the bigger questions of where the demons come from, how they can be
controlled, and just why they seem to be a particularly American affliction.
In telling his story, Daryl Gregory takes us through a landscape full of pop
culture references and the peculiarities of American daily life. It’s a world
built on images and sounds from comic books, movies, music, and television
shows. Gregory is not the first to explore this particular milieu—both Michael
Chabon and Neil Gaiman have recently used comic book references and the
archetypes of American pop culture and mythology to comment on American society.
It’s a good way to straddle the line between mainstream and genre, and
Pandemonium should, in like manner, appeal to a wide cross section of
readers. For the science fiction reader, though, there are two influences in
particular that stand out in the narrative of Pandemonium: the visions of
A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick.
The America of Pandemonium, obsessed as it is by the possibilities and
consequences of demonic possession, is understandably full of people and social
movements trying to understand and explain what’s going on. One of Del’s first
steps along his journey to deal with his problem is a visit to the professional
International Conference on Possession and its rival gathering DemoniCon. Things
get even crazier when Del is contacted by a member of the Human League—yes, it
is a reference to the somewhat cheesy ‘80s synth-pop band—whose members are
convinced A. E. van Vogt was a prophet and his works, particularly Slan,
are a guide to combating the demons. Their presence adds an element of
conspiracy and paranoia to the story that is truly van Vogtian, which helps to
give the novel more of a sinister edge.
The influence of Philip K. Dick is even more pervasive in Pandemonium. It
begins with the revelation that in this reality Dick is still alive but has been
possessed by a demon who represents himself as Valis, the Vast Active Living
Intelligence System familiar to readers of Phil Dick’s last few novels.
Interestingly enough, Valis’s possession is seemingly the one case of benign
possession in the world. Phil Dick, under Valis’s influence, is portrayed as a
relatively sociable, happy individual, rid of the obsessions and darkness that
bothered him throughout too much of his life, and Del’s conversation with Valis
is one of the real highlights of the novel.
While Valis makes an actual appearance in Pandemonium, it’s the early
novels of Philip K. Dick that have a greater influence on the story itself. The
reality inversions of novels like Time out of Joint and The World
Jones Made are an obvious source of inspiration for what Gregory is up to in
Pandemonium from the creation of its alternate reality to the eventual
resolution of its plot. The influence of Philip K. Dick is, of course, pervasive
throughout modern science fiction, but what Daryl Gregory has accomplished in
Pandemonium lies not so much in invoking the style of Philip K. Dick as it
does in adopting Dick’s methods, especially the ability to lead the reader into
a reality that both the novel’s characters and the reader believe to be one
thing, while actually being another. That methodology, along with a setting
immersed in the popular culture of late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century America, makes Pandemonium a novel that offers
surprises, insight, and amusement on nearly every page.
It’s an old saying of the theatre that great performers always leave their
audience wanting more. Pandemonium has a measure of that quality in that
reaching the end of the story leaves the reader wanting to know more of this
world and the characters who inhabit it. This is especially true when towards
the end of the novel, the Human League and its preoccupation with van Vogtian
reality fade out of the main story. Philip K. Dick fans would also probably not
mind another look at Valis and the fascinating portrayal of a possessed science
fiction writer. But there’s also the probability that expanding Pandemonium
into a longer book could have made the story feel bloated and overwrought.
Instead, Pandemonium rushes by like an out-of-control freight train
driven by Smokestack Johnny, throwing scenes, impressions, and references at the
reader so fast that the next one whizzes by before the previous one can fully
register.
In its vision of an America dominated by pop culture and its combination of
humor and darkness, Pandemonium joins Minister Faust’s The Coyote
Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad as a first novel that swims confidently
against the tide of grand space opera and epic fantasy that dominates much of
current science fiction and fantasy. And like the Minister Faust novel,
Pandemonium is the work of a young writer willing to play with the conventions
of science fiction and fantasy and turn them in to a fresh, new vision of the
world we live in.