Demon -- Tosca Lee

Longtime readers of the blog will realize that Demon isn't the kind of book I usually review here. There's a story about that, of course. During the Thanksgiving holiday, the family ate at the House of Blues in Houston and visited a new downtown mall nearby. There's a huge Books-a-Million in the mall, and somehow I wound up there. When I saw Tosca Lee, the author of Demon, at a signing table. I drifted over. I've sat at plenty of those tables, and I always try to support any author I see at one when I'm in a store. So that's how I came to buy a copy of the book.

The book's subtitle is "A Memoir," and that's what it is. Lucian, a demon, tells his story to a man named Clay, who's an editor at a Boston publishing house. In the process of hearing the tale, Clay realizes that Lucian' s story is in some way Clay's story, too.

Lucian's story doesn't come all at once. It's intertwined with the story Clay's own life, which isn't going so well. His wife has left him, his work is suffering, and he hasn't been able to write that novel he's always wanted to get published. It's an interesting story, but it doesn't seem at first to compare to Lucian's which is the story of the fall, of Eden, of creation, of the coming of Jesus, his death and his resurrection. Sure, that's a story you may have heard before, but not from the point of view of a demon. It's a unique perspective.

Lee's lucid style pulled me into the book from the very beginning, and then I got interested in Clay's problems as well as the theology. It's all handled very well, and it's surprisingly suspenseful. Demon isn't some uplifting spiritual tract. It's a good story, well told. Check it out.