TITLE: The Boy Who Could See Demons
AUTHOR: Carolyn Jess-Cooke
GENRE: Fiction/Literature (Adult)
RELEASE DATE: August 13, 2013, Delacorte Press
SOURCE: Digital ARC (Netgalley)
As a child psychiatrist, Anya Molokova is familiar with the demons that can plague an unstable mind. She even has firsthand experience, having suffered the death of her own daughter from mental illness. But when she meets a small boy named Alex, she takes on the most baffling, disturbing case of her career. For Alex, demons are real. They congregate in the corners of his room, speak to him in broad daylight, and can manifest at any time. He tells Anya that his best friend is one such demon called Ruen, but he doesn’t tell her that Ruen wants him to do terrible things. Things like hurting other people, and hurting himself. Is Ruen a product of the child’s psychosis, or something else entirely?
I seldom venture into adult lit these days, but I’m always interested in books that deal with child psychology because I work with kids on a daily basis. Of course, there was also the possible occult angle, which made me want to read this one even more. The Boy Who Could See Demons was a relatively short read that covered a number of tough subjects — from the tumultuous history of Northern Ireland to the debilitating effects of mental illness. While at times it had the tendency to sound like an academic paper or someone’s doctoral dissertation, it also unfolded with excellent pacing that kept me guessing until the very end.
I liked that this book always kept me on uneven footing. I could never completely decide if Alex’s demons were real or illusion, and I spent the entire book collecting clues. It’s always refreshing when I can’t predict what’s going to happen. All the isolated incidents that come up in Anya’s investigation are linked, and I could see the pattern, but I really didn’t have a definitive guess until it was over. (I guessed right, but that conclusion was pretty hard-won.) Alex’s case combines events and details that are frightening precisely because they could feasibly be related to all the trauma he’s experienced, BUT you’re never sure if that’s the whole reason. There’s this lingering possibility that it could really be demons, that hell could truly be as accessible as opening a door and finding the room crowded with malicious spirits only he can see. I was afraid for Alex, and increasingly so.
Alex’s relationship with Ruen, his 9,000-year-old demonic ‘friend’, was a major focal point of the story for me. Their interactions constantly embodied the idea that good and evil vary greatly based on perspective. Ruen’s ability to make Alex question preconceived notions of right and wrong were downright scary at times. Even scarier was the fact that all of this could be due to the machinations of Alex’s mind and not a supernatural entity at all. In the end, which is more frightening? The thought that Alex was being influenced by a demon, or the thought that Ruen’s influence was entirely the product of his delusions?
The narrative alternates between Anya’s journal entries and Alex’s, which I didn’t mind. What bothered me was that Anya’s entries often verged on the cold and clinical, reading more like an article in a psychiatry text than the narration of a real person. Her entries also had this annoying tendency to flip back and forth between present and past tense, which was confusing and detracted from the journal entry effect. Another thing that bugged me about Anya’s side of things was the addition of this weird romantic subplot that I felt was unnecessary. Not only were those parts distracting, they also seemed pretty irrelevant. I wish Anya’s narrative had focused solely on her investigation of Alex’s condition and how it affected her without crossing over into a possible romance with his social worker.
Alex’s half of the story was told in a more convincing, accessible way. You really get to know him and the nuances of his personality. Much of the plot’s unpredictability lies in the way Alex tells his experiences, because children are known to tell things the way they see them, and it’s really unsettling to hear a seven year old talk about the demon whispering in his ear…
RATING: 3/5
This is a pretty compelling story that invites you to look at good versus evil from a different angle. I spent the whole time trying to piece the puzzle together and wasn’t able to come up with a solid theory until it was practically over. The Boy Who Could See Demons was short, readable, and did a good job of keeping me guessing. I will say that there is a lot of commentary on Northern Ireland that kind of went over my head since I’m not very familiar with the history there, so you might want to brush up on facts before you read just to get more out of the experience.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Delacorte Press and Netgalley for the ARC!
