Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory
Last week I read Pandemonium, a first novel by Daryl Gregory, in which the world was altered in the mid-1940s with the appearance of demons — or perhaps Jungian archetypes — that seemed to possess individual humans for hours or weeks to satisfy their mysterious urges. The public has given these demons names based on their behaviors: The Captain with his A and shield, who saves soldiers in combat; the Truth, with his fedora and silver pistols, who kills liars; the Little Angel, with her little-girl body and long curls, who bestows the kiss of death on the elderly and suffering; and others. One man, Del Pierce, was possessed by the the violently mischievous Hellion when he was a child; now he’s afraid the demon may still be trapped inside of him, fighting to get out.
Pandemonium falls into the same category as — and was, perhaps, inspired by — the Unknown Armies roleplaying game and the Lost Room miniseries from the Sci-Fi Channel. In Unknown Armies, the occult underground is aware of the existence of embodied archetypes that have taken on godlike powers. Individuals and groups vie with each other to collect potent objects and model themselves after archetypical characters in order to capture enough of the public imagination to manifest as new sorts of urban deities. In Lost Room, by contrast, the occult underground is aware of a lost hotel room that was involved in some sort of cataclysmic “event” that has imbued the room and everything that was inside it with strange powers. Collectors seek to gather the Objects from the room for a variety of purposes, from gaining personal power to unlocking the secret behind the Room itself.
I don’t know what it is about this kind of story that so captures my imagination, but I fell in love with the concept behind Unknown Armies the first time I read a review copy sent to me back in the glory days of my acting as About.Com’s RPG guide. There’s something about the idea of archetypes springing alive from our collective unconscious — a meshing of pop culture, analytical psychology, cultural anthropology, and semiotics — that appeals to me. Maybe it’s that archetypes offer some sort of explanation for a chaotic world, a way of sorting through all the information with which I’m inundated every day and explaining the strange appeal of certain celebrities or fashions or trends to mass society. Or maybe it’s just a way to recapture a sense of magic in our crowded, urban, mass-produced world.
Pandemonium was enjoyable the way Lost Room was enjoyable, inasmuch as the novel takes you through its strange world of body-hopping demon/archetypes and, as Lost Room, finally offers an explanation of “what happened” at the end — but not an explanation that explains everything. There’s still enough mystery left to leave the reader wanting to know more, and when you’re dealing with archetypical characters or ur-Objects, realizing that there are limits to your knowledge seems only fitting.
Send me more of this, please.
drupagliassotti @ November 20, 2008