The Demonologist

Starred review from January 14, 2013
A mesmerizing and melancholy narrative voice lends chilling credibility to this exceptional supernatural thriller. Milton scholar David Ullman, who teaches English literature at Columbia, believes that loneliness, each person’s going like Adam and Eve “their solitary way,” is the real theme of Paradise Lost. Outside of work, the professor has a failed marriage and a beloved 11-year-old daughter, Tess. One day, a “worryingly thin” woman with a generic European accent shows up at his campus office with an unusual offer. The woman, who says she represents a client “who demands discretion above all,” will pay Ullman a sum a third larger than his annual salary if he will travel immediately to Venice to observe a “phenomenon” that his expertise on demons qualifies him to assess. Ullman protests that he doesn’t believe in demons, but in the end, accompanied by Tess, he goes to Venice, where tragedy ensues. Pyper (Lost Girl) is especially gifted at plausibly anthropomorphizing inanimate objects to creepy effect. A standard rural mailbox is transformed into “a stooped figure, lurching after me, its mouth wide in a scream”; a book becomes “a mouth gasping for air.” Agent: Stephanie Cabot, the Gernert Company.

December 15, 2012
In Pyper's (The Guardians, 2011, etc.) sixth novel, professor David Ullman's marriage has imploded, his closest confidant has terminal cancer, and he's been approached by a mysterious emaciated woman offering an all-expenses-paid first-class trip to Venice. A renowned expert on Milton's Paradise Lost, Ullman is a Columbia University professor. Acting on behalf of a nameless client, the Thin Woman, as Ullman calls her, asks him to observe a "phenomenon," a thing she too has seen, but "there is no name for it I could give." That evening Ullman's wife tells him she's leaving him for another man, and he decides to escape to Venice accompanied by his beloved daughter, Tess, "a smart, bookishly aloof girl," who like him is plagued by melancholy. In Venice, Ullman confronts one of the devil's Legion infecting an Italian professor's body. Ullman panics. Before he can gather his wits, Tess apparently commits suicide. As she leaps to her death, Ullman hears from her, in that same devilish voice, a recitation from Milton's epic. The action returns to New York City, Ullman confused, near-suicidal and haunted by the fear that all he has not believed may be real. "Screwing the lid off [his] imagination," Ullman reads Tess' diary and begins to think his daughter isn't dead but instead in the clutches of the Unnamed, perhaps one of Pandemonium's Stygian Council. Plagued by signs and omens, Ullman treks from North Dakota to Kansas to Florida to Ontario and back to New York. His confidant and friend, Elaine O'Brien, another professor, rides along in support. There are killings, possessions and philosophical speculations, with the pair shadowed by the Pursuer, perhaps an agent of Rome. Pyper is an intelligent writer, steeped in Miltonian symbolism, gifted with language, enough so that fans of the genre will shiver with cold sweat when the Stygian demon wanders out to bark, spit and hiss. This artful literary exploration of evil's manifestation makes for a sophisticated horror tale.

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October 15, 2012

Arthur Ellis Award winner Pyper returns with the tale of Professor David Ullman, an expert in demonic literature who doesn't believe in the subject of his research. Things change when a mysterious woman invites him to witness an event in Venice and his daughter is promptly kidnapped by the Unnamed. Film interest in this one, as well as Pyper's other best sellers (e.g., The Killing Circle).

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2012
The evil of Milton's Pandemoniumcomes to life when English professor David Ullman accepts an invitation to come to Venice for consulting worka strange offer for a Milton scholar. Desperate to escape his cheating wife and her pompous lover, he takes his young daughter, Tess, to the City of Bridges on what he hopes will be a welcome diversion. Instead he is introduced to a reality that he never knew existed outside of his books: that of dark demons looking for inroads into our world. With his daughter taken, Ullman embarks on a search for her with only Milton's Paradise Lost as a guide. Along the way he is pursued by malevolent forces looking alternately to exploit and bury his discovery. Traveling from North Dakota to Florida to New York, he finds clues not only to his daughter's freedom but also to his enemy's nature and his own tragic past. Pyper's novel takes on things that go bump in the brain and delivers a stirring entry in the supernatural-thriller genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)