Review: The Devil's Equinox

The Devil's Equinox by John Everson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These "villains" really believe--and that's what is so scary. Not the hangers-on, those folks who just participate at Club Equinox for the orgies and BDSM and funky alcoholic concoctions and the pleasure of perversions--but the inner core, the real "bad guys," the ones who quite literally will stop at nothing to obtain the Power. Those are terrifying. Fanatics always are.

John Everson's newest novel is so powerful, so terrifying, so implacable in the evil it describes, that I could not stop reading. I'm not sure which terrified me more, the implacable fanaticism of the believers--or the ending. Just when you thought it was safe----. What a conclusion!

Austin is a Marketing Manager in a quiet, laidback, community in Central Illinois. He is married to a woman he once deeply cherished, and the father of a beloved infant daughter (approaching toddler age, but not yet walking). He and wife Angie just don't get along any more, or perhaps Angie is just contemptuous of him. At any rate, Austin makes an enormous error; drinking at his hquiet local, he tells a stranger, at midnight, he wishes his wife would die. If that resulted in the Devil taking Austin's soul, that would be one consequence, and perhaps understandable. But Austin, in his alcoholic fog and lust and thoughtlessness, embarks on a course which will damage not only him, but those he holds dear. A foolish "wish" which immediately becomes a horrifying lesson in "Be careful what you wish for."

View all my reviews