A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans

The devil and all his works have always been fodder for fiction, and now Justin Evans has added George Davies to the playgrounds of the possessed. We meet Davies as a new father seeking help for a peculiar problem: he’s afraid to touch his son. Clunky second person sections between the adult Davies and his psychiatrist serve as segues to the real story, told unreliably through Davies’ diaries, of his possession at age 11 by demons. But Evans has a mild case of intellectualism: Davies’ parents are both academics. His father wrote a critically un-acclaimed book on evil and his mother is a feminist who can’t get a job. Marx, Lacan, and Jung get dropped in a haphazard way, and characters are summed up as specimens of scholarly ‘unconventionality’: "My mother’s fantasy of fulfillment… was living in Berlin, androgynous, underdressed, and steeped in literary theory." There is tension between the adult George, trying to make sense of his horrific past, and his younger self, diving head first into his own personal horror flick, but Evans – a former film scout for Paramount – seems to have written this with a film treatment already in mind; the big questions are picked up and put down, but the real energy is saved for some really cool exorcism scenes. [Hannah Brooks-Motl]