James Nicoll Reviews

Alex Brown’s 2023 Damned If You Do is a stand-alone horror novel.

Cordelia Scott has a lot on her plate, from stage managing a play, to her rapidly imploding grade point average, to attaining the perfect mix of obsession and indecisiveness with regard to her crush/best friend Veronica. Demons, she does not need.

Demons, Cordelia’s got.

Cordelia has a new guidance counselor, Fred Williams. Cordelia believes that she has never met Fred before. Fred is convinced otherwise. This is because Fred is the demon with whom Cordelia made a pact years before in an entirely successful bid to send her abusive father to Hell.

While Cordelia’s stubborn amnesia is new, demonic pacts are old hat in Ruin’s End. Town folklore accepts that demonic pacts are real¹. It is said that on the annual Deal Day, someone in town makes a deal with a demon and enjoys the benefits thereof. As such deals are entirely confidential, it’s impossible to verify the legends.

With some prodding from Fred, Cordelia reluctantly admits that yes, Fred is a demon, yes, Fred saved her life by dispatching her homicidal father, and yes, the bill for that has finally come due. Luckily for Cordelia, Fred doesn’t want to carry Cordelia off to Hell. He needs help dealing with one of his fellow demons.

The legends are perfectly true. Ruin’s End was founded thanks to a demonic pact. For the last almost-a-century, Marbas, the demon responsible, has been making deals with mortals and accumulating power. All Marbas needs is one last soul to prove that his experiment works. The project can then transition from product testing to franchising. Demon towns could spring up across the world — which would be bad².

For reasons of his own, Fred opposes this. Fred thinks he has a solution. Immediately after cutting his deal with Cordelia, Fred was sealed away in a statue for seven years. Perhaps if Marbas could be sealed away before he collects his hundredth soul, the experiment would fail.

It’s a perfect plan, except for one or two minor details. Marbas is more powerful than Fred, Fred does not know how he was trapped in the statue, how to duplicate the trick, or how he escaped. Nevertheless, Fred does have Cordelia.

Not only does Cordelia owe Fred, she’s the ideal bait to draw a powerful demon out into the open.

~oOo~

Why did I read this book? Because I noticed it on World Theatre Day and saw that the plot involved a theatrical production. There are worse reasons to pick a book.

Some time ago I lost my enthusiasm for fire and explosions on stage, which was just about the time that I became responsible for managing the aftermath of pyrotechnic mishaps. From a professional perspective, adding hellfire and demonic invocations to a dramatic production would result in considerable additional operating costs.

(If any of my co-workers were to be inspired by this book, I would bring up the cost issue. If this weren’t the case, well… summoning entities of pure, concentrated malice doesn’t seem like it would be worse than using TixHub³.)

Once again, a novel that suggests that teenagers do not manage their romantic lives with the relentless efficiency of a Milk Morinaga protagonist. In fact, it’s almost as though they don’t really know what they are doing (and that which is perfectly obvious to everyone around them is unclear to the teens themselves). Significant if true!

The prose style of this novel is one appropriate to a light-hearted supernatural romp, which is why the domestic abuse and graphic murder came as a surprise. In fact, Cordelia is playing a high stakes game she could lose, and the fact that Hell is real means it’s entirely possible that she can lose. In that case, the novel would be her account of how she died and ended up in Hell. Real suspense!

While I’d have liked a bit more focus on the stage management aspect of the plot, theatre being why I snagged this novel out of the pile, the novel otherwise delivered the reading experience I wanted.

Damned If You Do is available here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). I did not find Damned If You Do at Bookshop UK.

1: Which does not seem to extend to providing the town with a more marketable name than Ruin’s End.

2: USA delenda est.

3: Even with the hellfire, I am not entirely convinced TixHub is better than demonic invocation. At least there wouldn’t be connectivity issues with demons.

To my intense surprise, I recently discovered that there is an even more inefficient method of managing tickets that some organizations use. For all its faults, TixHub at least provides a definitive number for seats sold, which means hard-working house managers don’t have to spend the show worried that the client sold more seats than exist.