Book Review: To the Devil, A Daughter by Dennis Wheatley

To the Devil, A Daughter
By Dennis Wheatley
Bloomsbury Reader
ISBN: 978-1448212620
2014; $15.00 trade paperback; $7.99 ebook

Long before William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST ushered in a new-found fascination with the Devil, Satanism, and all things occult in the 1970s, Dennis Wheatley was penning occult thrillers that attracted readers by titillating them with tales of Satanic cults committing unspeakable acts in service of the Devil. TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER is one of Wheatley’s “Black Magic” novels (one of eleven out of his 60+ novels) recently reprinted by Bloomsbury. Though it doesn’t involve any of the protagonists of his earlier Black Magic novel (THE DEVIL RIDES OUT), TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER is explicitly set in the same setting, with some of the events of RIDES OUT briefly alluded to in DAUGHTER.

Some minor plot spoilers follow.

The story opens simply enough with Molly Fountain, a mystery novelist who had served as a secretary in British intelligence circles during the war, wondering who her mysterious new neighbor is. Fountain is renting a house in the French Riviera while she writes her latest manuscript when a young woman moves in next door. The young woman lives alone, never receives visitors, and wanders around outside at night, which seems innocent enough, but this attracts Fountain’s interest. After introducing herself to the young woman, Fountain learns that the young woman is far more mysterious than she initially appears: she is living under an assumed name and has been sent to France by her distant father and ordered to remain in hiding there until after her upcoming birthday. Fountain is an inveterate meddler who can’t leave well enough alone, so she arranges for her university student son John and an old friend who still works for British intelligence, Colonel Verney, to come for a visit and help her get to the bottom of the mystery. As it turns out, Fountain needs all the help she can get when it becomes apparent that the young woman is being sought by a Satanic cult with whom her father had formerly been involved and is at the center of a truly disturbing plot (which I don’t want to spoil). What follows is a desperate race across France and England to protect the girl and then retrieve her once she falls into the hands of the villains before she can be sacrificed.

Wheatley was known to have done a good bit of research on the occult and magical practitioners in the course of his writing career, and it’s known that he carried on correspondence with Aleister Crowley, among others. Not to spoil anything, but Crowley and some of his past enter the story here through some lengthy expository passages. As with previous Black Magic novels, Wheatley makes no bones about it: magic and the Devil are real, and those who serve dark forces can freely call upon them for tangible aid. Wheatley has received criticism over the years for inflicting his research on his readers, but I think including these passages on magic and the workings of its practitioners only adds to the story and the sense of verisimilitude that Wheatley tries to create in what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill pulpish thriller.

Hammer Horror adapted this novel – very loosely – for film in a 1976 version starring Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman, and Natassja Kinski. The plot of the film bears only the most superficial resemblance to the novel, and was excoriated by Wheatley, who deemed it obscene. If you’re a fan of Hammer, or Christopher Lee, it’s worth watching nevertheless, it just doesn’t have much to do with the book, outside of dealing with roughly similar themes.

Recommended as a good entry point to Wheatley’s fiction (especially his Black Magic novels) and an entertaining read in its own right. What could have been a stereotypical adventure novel from the early 1950s is, in Wheatley’s hands, a slow reveal of the plot pervaded by a genuine sense of menace. The stakes are very real, the villains truly monstrous, and the heroes unafraid to use extreme measures to put an end to the scheme.

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Review copyright © 2014 J. Andrew Byers

Book Review: Dog Eat Dog by David J. Rodger

David J. Rodger is a world-builder with a compelling vision. He has crafted a setting he calls “Yellow Dawn,” and has already published several supporting novels – DOG EAT DOG among them – plus a role-playing game and several short stories. In the mid-twenty-first century world of Yellow Dawn, civilization as we know it ended ten years ago. A pathogen (the eponymous “Yellow Dawn”) infected 70% of the world’s population, killing many and essentially turning the rest into fast-moving, aggressive zombies (a few more have been transformed into “orcs,” mutated humans who are forced to live in savage conditions in the wilderness). Most of the world’s cities had to be abandoned, though a few urban enclaves – like Manhattan – remain as heavily fortified strongholds dominated by corporate overlords and plutocrats. Because the plague struck at some point in the near future, Earth’s orbital colonies also remain uninfected and periodically intervene, covertly, in terrestrial affairs. Outside of the few cities still inhabited by living humans lie the Dead Cities and Dead Zones, areas abandoned to the zombie hordes that offer dangerous opportunities for scavenging. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Yellow Dawn infection is at least ostensibly connected with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, specifically Hastur, the King in Yellow, originally created by Robert W. Chambers. So DOG EAT DOG certainly has an interesting background.

The story of DOG EAT DOG is told through the eyes of two survivors of the Yellow Dawn, Mikhail Drobná and Carlos Revira, who quickly become embroiled in conflicts and politics much bigger than themselves. Drobná is a thug and bodyguard for a crime lord in New York City and Revira is a kind of freelance intelligence operative, but their paths soon cross as both men engage in a variety of complicated skullduggery for their respective masters. In the course of all of this, they both become isolated and more or less on their own as they engage in double-crosses and are themselves betrayed. I don’t want to give away too much of the details of all of this as, (1) the twists, turns, and reversals of fortune are an important part of the plot; (2) it’s all fairly complex, with lots of unfamiliar names of people and organizations engaging in secret agent and criminal cat-and-mouse games that would require more wordcount than I care to devote to it; and (3) I am reluctantly forced to admit that large chunks of the plot were not all that interesting or memorable.

I enjoyed DOG EAT DOG for the most part, but I have some criticisms of it. First, most prominently, the yellow dawn infection, its aftermath, and the existence of tens of millions of zombies infesting the wilderness areas outside the few small urban enclaves of uninfected humans mostly serves as backdrop. It’s a phenomenal origin story for a futuristic post-apocalyptic setting, but Rodger doesn’t do much with it. Most of the plot doesn’t actually involve the zombies at all; much of it is mostly a story of near-future corporate intrigue that could take place in a setting that doesn’t have any of the horror/zombie-infested, post-collapse elements. I wanted the infection and the zombies to be much more fore-grounded and a driver of the plot rather than mere backdrop. The action that happens in the less civilized areas involving zombies is very well done – I just wanted a great deal more of it. Second, the world of DOG EAT DOG is one in which traditional nation-states and all the familiar institutions of modern society have gone away. There are no more countries, or organizations like the CIA and KGB, or anything else with which the reader is familiar. Instead, we’re reading a story about E-FIB and UTOC and MOCID. It’s much harder for the reader to care about anything of those things, especially when one has to keep reminding oneself what those things even mean, and then guess what their interests and goals might be. It serves to distance the reader from the action on the page; that was a common problem of much of the cyberpunk of the 1980s and it still bedevils DOG EAT DOG. And third, while I know that there are Lovecraftian elements to the setting, they mostly aren’t depicted here. I love Lovecraft and Chambers’ work and would have liked to see it explicitly come into play in DOG EAT DOG. There are some really intriguing hints of sinister goings-on in the last third or so of the book, but they remain unexplored hints.

I really wanted to like DOG EAT DOG a great deal more than I did. The setting is great, and could provide a tremendous platform for any number of exciting stories. But the bulk of the story that Rodger chose to tell here is not really all that exciting. It certainly goes on far too long, and too many boring parts were never streamlined or excised by a draconian editor. I’d like to see more from David J. Rodger, because I think his Yellow Dawn setting has real potential, but I hope that the sequel to DOG EAT DOG does a better job of capturing my interest.

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Review copyright © 2014 J. Andrew Byers