My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

“Demons are ideas made flesh,” Brother Lemon said. “Bad ideas. The one inside your friend is discord, anger, and rage. He is the bringer of storms with a smile like lightning, brother of owls and giver of nightborn intelligence. He is the cleaving that can never be healed.”

A book is only as good as its bad guy, and the problem with most demons is that they’re stupid. Why possess a 12-year-old girl instead of the President of the United States? Why possess some mom living off in the middle of nowhere instead of someone capable of causing a nuclear power plant to melt down? In Christian theology, demons are there to test the faith of the exorcist, the person they possess (the demoniac) is irrelevant, they’re just the battlefield for the war between the priest and the demon. I wanted my demoniac to matter, but that meant I needed my demon to have an agenda beyond simply possessing Gretchen and waiting for an exorcist to show up. I was reading the Lesser Key of Solomon, a 17th century grimoire, as you do, when I came across Andras. Not only did this demon have a rocking look (naked lady with an owl’s head riding a wolf and carrying a sword) but it hated friendship, it hated love, it hated people getting along. Being possessed sucks, but being possessed by something that wants to alienate everyone around you? That’s a very particular kind of high school nightmare.