Every single one of us, the devil inside

I am a sucker for literary horror novels, so I was thrilled when I heard about A Good and Happy Child. The main character is a man who will not touch his infant son. We learn that he fears he will pass on the taint of demonic possession, which he believes killed his father and nearly killed him. The book is spent mostly in the past, in the form of attempts by the grown man to understand what happened to him in his youth.

The author nicely balances the possibility that the narrator and his family are afflicted by mental illness and the chance that he really is possessed. His mother sees it all as illness, while family friends bring him closer and closer to an exorcism. Whether it be spiritual or not, the final pages are themselves a kind of exorcism. The pacing of the story is excellent, and the author brings in a fine amount of creepy detail without ever becoming base, as most horror novels do.

Anyone familiar with Virginia is likely to spot that the novel's center of action, Preston, is really Lexington, VA. It is a mountain town with a military school and a college that was re-named for a Civil War general. In our world, that is Washington & Lee, in the book it is Jubal Early College. On this page, the author talks a bit about Lexington-Preston.

This book is not the extreme horror of the Ruins, but is more akin to the psychological horror of Flicker or the Secret History. This is the author's first book and I expect there will be a lot more to come.