Demon Camp

November 11, 2013
Tropes surrounding veterans in the public discourse—invincible warriors, heroic patriots—mask the reality of warfare, but Percy peels back the gauze, revealing deeply wounded individuals. Having enlisted to escape hometown oppression or untenably low positions on the socioeconomic ladder, veterans return haunted by the violence they’ve endured. Caleb, Percy’s primary subject, is besieged by apparitions after his closest friend dies in a helicopter crash, and comes to rely on his hallucinations to get him through the day. An army psychologist explains that sufferers of PTSD will relive their trauma “again and again until the mind is able to assimilate and process the event,” experiencing a world of demons more real than physical objects. Caleb and other veterans are drawn to tiny Portal, Ga., where a self-taught pastor engages in “spiritual warfare,” claiming he stopped counting the number of exorcisms he’s performed after 5,000. Percy becomes part of the life of the church, where the veterans and the true believers maintain a measure of distance, treating each other with a mutual wariness. Her sharp, unadorned writing captures the rawness of the congregants’ lives, the permeability of the borderline between reality and imagination —her own exorcism proving to her “how easily, how intrusively, a heightened situation can make us, any of us, slip.”

November 15, 2013
Caleb Daniels was serving in Afghanistan in 2005 when a helicopter crash claimed the lives of his best friend and several other men. After he returned stateside, Daniels began seeing his dead friends, right there in front of him. And he's not the only veteran who sees the dead. It is, apparently, a fairly common element of PTSD. Haunted not only by the dead but by something he believes to be a demon (he calls it the Black Thing), Daniels underwent an exorcism conducted by a minister in the small town of Portal, Georgia, and eventually married the minister's daughter. Now he helps other war veterans find a measure of peace in Portal, where the minister's Christian camp delivers them from their torture. Percy maintains a steadfastly neutral journalistic tone here, telling us Caleb Daniels' story (and the stories of other veterans, too) and taking us inside the camp at Portal, but it never feels like she's passing judgment. Are these men actually undergoing exorcisms, or are they engineering their own psychological cures? It's up to us to determine how we feel about that.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)