The Boy Who Could See Demons

June 24, 2013
British poet Jess-Cooke follows her fiction debut, The Guardian Angel’s Journal, with a searing novel of suspense that plumbs a bereaved mother’s anguish. Anya Molokova, a child psychiatrist, has returned to her native Belfast hoping to help heal some of the 20 percent of Northern Ireland’s children who suffer from severe mental health problems. Anya, herself both the child of a suicidal parent and the agonized mother of a schizoid daughter who died tragically four years earlier, becomes professionally and personally involved with Alex Broccoli, a tormented 10-year-old with an imaginary demon friend. Jess-Cooke’s scalding descriptions of Belfast and its mental health care system ring painfully true, but the facile conclusion turns this perceptive exploration of schizophrenia upside down, even as it reinforces the novel’s predominant message—that as another poet long ago made his demon tempter insist, ordinary “reality” can indeed be an inescapable hell. Agent: Madeline Buston, Darley Anderson Literary Agency (U.K.).

March 15, 2013

Child psychiatrist Anya Molokova has been asked to assess ten-year-old Alex, who claims that the wily demon Ruen is telling him to hurt himself and others. Anguished by her own daughter's early-onset schizophrenia, Anya thinks Alex, too, is hearing voices--then realizes that Ruen might not be imaginary. Great reviewer and reader response where this book has already been published.

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