A Good and Happy Child

Starred review from March 12, 2007
This stunning novel marks the debut of a serious talent. Evans manages to take a familiar concept—the young child haunted by a demon invisible to others—and infuse it with psychological depth and riveting suspense. The setting alternates between George Davies's difficult childhood in Preston, Va., a small college town, after his father Paul's untimely death, and his equally challenging life as an adult and new father in New York City. Ostracized by his classmates and emotionally isolated by his mother, a struggling academic, young George begins to be visited by a doppelgänger, who, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, intimates that foul play was involved in Paul's death. When those visitations lead to violence, George begins receiving psychiatric treatment. Meanwhile, some of his late father's colleagues claim that demonic possession is a reality. Evans subtly evokes terror and anxiety with effective understatement. The intelligence and humanity of this thriller should help launch it onto bestseller lists.

Starred review from March 1, 2007
This debut novel grips readers from the first chapter, which introduces 30-year-old George Davies, a man whose life is falling apart because he is scared to death to be in the same room as his newborn son. When he consults a psychiatrist for help, readers are thrust into the past, encountering George as a pudgy, friendless boy whose father has just died under mysterious circumstances. Is George really possessed by a demon, or is he just losing his mind? Does he need an exorcismas his father's friends believeor should he be committed to the state asylum? New York City strategy and business development executive Evans delivers a creepy and entertaining story full of perfectly written characters. A definite recommendation for any library.Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park, MD

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2007
Perched precariously on the precipice between horror and psychological drama, Evans' first novel explores the notions of demons--how real they are and how real we are able to make them. Eleven-year-old George Davies' father, a self-purported mystic and studier of demonology, dies a mysterious death after traveling to Honduras for equally mysterious purposes. Soon after, George is visited by a "Friend" that only he can see, who leads him on thrilling yet terrifying journeys to a shadowy ether-world, pulling him ever closer to a dangerous awareness of his father's death (the cornucopia of fatherhood issues emanating here would make Freud's head wobble). Is the boy really possessed, or simply crazy? And which is better? Evans deftly marks the labyrinthine wards of clinical treatment in stark contrast with scenes of floor-dropping exorcisms as the boy becomes ever more volatile and his Friend ever more diabolical. This is an edgy, compelling read--more unnerving than scary--that will slide its hooks deep inside and throttle you more than a few times before it's all over.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)