Control: Demons are Bad…

I, Dalton Lewis, don’t worship demons, but I’d certainly like their opinions on things. I mean — why are they so angry? Why do they seem to always want to possess people? I am writing a horror novel called Modern Goth but don’t have any demons in it. I don’t think that they fit this current story — several interconnected tales about the concept of gothic literature and the definition of goth itself.

I don’t know. I guess we have to start by defining the term demon. If, by demon, you mean a servant of the Christian enemy Satan, an entity which wants to occupy the body of an otherwise innocent young girl, then fine: demons are bad. Corrupting young girls is bad stuff. I’m all for saying that — let’s keep our virgins pure. Keep them safe and away from all the dangerous real life situations that could cause them to grow up and mature.

Demons steal bodies and murder and rape and kill. That’s bad. That’s also a metaphor, a metaphor for the desire of Christians to protect their Christian schoolgirl children from the reality of a world with sex, drinking, drugs, and rock and roll music that is so tempting. I know that, in an ideal world, a person doesn’t do drugs or drink or have sex or listen to rock music at all, but I’ve done all of those things, and I even enjoyed all of them. I quit drinking but can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the occasional night — or year — of being gloriously drunk. The Christian religion has to fight against the concept of sin because it’s wrong to get drunk or have sex with someone beautiful or even have a little bit of fun now and again, right? Well, they have a point: too much drinking or sex can lead to disastrous consequences. I almost lost everything to alcoholism a number of years ago. I couldn’t really function except by drinking most of every day. I had to quit.

In many fiction stories there’s that one innocent demon who bucks the trend. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer demons are bad and need to be killed, but Angel and Spike are innocent demons who aren’t bad guys. The rest of the demons can be killed without any feeling badly about it, though. That’s the heart of it, right — there need to be bad guys. They need to be mindlessly evil, purely evil, so that it’s okay to root against them and want them to be killed in droves. One shouldn’t think of them as having families and friends and children and parents and full lives. One shouldn’t think that they have empathy and care for those around them. The Christian tradition thinks of demons as mindless villains who want to destroy everything good and pure. This doesn’t fit with any sort of real-life being. A real-life demon would be much more complicated than that — with depth and layers and contradictions and sympathy.

That’s the point, right: the sympathetic villain sells. The villain that we can understand and root for becomes scarier than most of the villains who are just mindless bad guys, trying to destroy reality because they need to do something for the good guys to stop. Loki is a better bad guy because he loves to screw around and thinks he should be in charge of everything. The Joker is so lovable because he wants to show what’s wrong with life. He has so much fun with his anarchy and chaos. We understand their perspective; we admire them as they do their thing. We root for them a little bit as they do horrible things.

I’m finishing a novel. It’s called Modern Goth. It might sell half a dozen or a dozen copies. I hope it sells a thousand copies, but that’s not realistic. My mom says that I should be realistic about my chances to make it as a novelist. It’s not likely to happen. Oh. I need to think of this as a hobby and not as much a career. Okay. I suppose that I shouldn’t dream of making it as a professional novelist. After all I’m forty-three and live with my parents.

In conclusion demons are monsters without any thought of morality according to the Christian church. I think that the reality is that some demons must be sympathetic or at least sympathetic villains. There’s got to be a perspective there, right? I want to talk to a demon to see why he or she wants to possess young girls and rape and kill so damn bad. I’m just curious.

Thanks, and take care, friends.