(originally published at talesfromideath.blogspot.com)Before I get into this review, I should mention that I won this book in a giveaway from the BookFox over on youtube. So head on over there and check out some of her videos. I should probably also mention that she was giving this book away because…well because she didn’t really like it, so going in, I didn’t have the highest expectations. I was surprised therefore, when I found myself adoring this book, racing through the first half in one sitting. I was hooked, sucked into the madness, spiraling ever downwards with Harry White, the book’s protagonist. And then…I stopped loving it. Then, it got difficult. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The book centres around Harry White, a man in a good job, with good prospects, women falling at his feet. He seems to have it all. As the book progresses Harry continues to climb in the world, he gets a promotion, a beautiful wife, a mansion house, beautiful kids, he’s living the dream. But with that success comes a need to destroy. A need to eliminate all he has accomplished. This starts with a series of affairs, but gradually spirals out of control as Harry slips ever further into self destruction and madness. And for a while, I was right there with him. I found Harry deeply unlikeable but fascinating, I wanted to know more, see how much he would deteriorate as the book went on. This is partly down to the writing style. Selby uses a stream of consciousness style of narrative. Topics jump from one place to another, paragraph breaks and traditional punctuation are thrown out the window. I found this style a little difficult to get into at first, it was my first experience with this kind of writing and I had to teach myself a little how to read it. Once I got the knack however, it turned out to be the perfect method of telling this story. The writing is frantic, topics blend together, characters begin to speak and, without traditional punctuation, it feels as if the dialogue is cutting into Harry’s internal thoughts. It’s messy, it’s jumbled it reads like the thought processes of someone in the middle of a mental breakdown, which of course it is. And then…it all happens again…and again…and again. Harry picks up some married woman, sleeps with her, abandons her, shows up late for work, gets in trouble with his boss, vows to turn his life around, picks up some married woman, sleeps with her…repeat, repeat, repeat. And all of a sudden, this frantic, engaging prose, loses all of its power. It becomes repetitive to the point of tedium and even though Harry Continues to spiral downward, his obsession growing constantly darker and more twisted, it fails to hold your interest. It does regain some momentum toward the end, and I did finish the book feeling more positive than not, but the frustrating repetition leaves this relatively short book feeling much longer and much heavier than it really should. If you’re a fan of writers in the style of Bret Easton Ellis and have never tried out any Hubert Selby Jr, this is worth giving a look. There are flashes of greatness here, even if the repetition can get boring. Even if the repetition can get boring. Even if the repetition can get boring. Even if the repetition can get boring. Even if the repetition can get boring. Even if the repetition can get boring. Even if the repetition can get boring....
C'est l'histoire d'Harry White un jeune cadre brillant dans son travail et véritable coureur de jupons à ses heures perdues. Bref, il a tout pour réussir et pourtant ...Il lui arrive parfois d'avoir en fin de journée une boule au creux du ventre. Un sentiment en demi-teinte, l'impression de se sentir légèrement cafardeux sans raison apparente. Un peu comme certains dimanches après avoir passé la journée à l'intérieur à ne rien faire. Le soir venu, il peut arriver d'avoir le spleen sans trop savoir pourquoi, le regret de n'avoir rien fait, l'appréhension du lundi matin. Parfois, il lui arrive de s'emporter, de bouillir de rage. Ca lui arrive souvent après un week-end agité en prenant le métro le lundi matin, difficile de supporter ce qu'il nomme la populace qu'il trouve grouillante et puante, de se mêler à elle, d'en faire partie. Difficile aussi pour lui de supporter les petits échecs qui sont le lot quotidien d'un jeune cadre au travail: les remontrances du chef, les commérages des collègues, les rivalités, la réussite des autres. Harry sent bien que quelque chose couve et pousse au fond de lui et se sent à l'étroit mais pour l'instant il arrive à le contenir.Le démon est une oeuvre surprenante et subtile. Hubert Selby Jr. mène la danse avec maestria, il parvient à dépeindre parfaitement la monté des états d'âmes et les efforts que fait Harry pour les refréner. Il sait trouver les mots justes pour décrire la souffrance et la détresse psychologique de son personnage. Dans son style caractéristique l'auteur de Requiem for a dream entremêle dialogues et narration en un flot continu et utilise des effets typographiques de retrait pour souligner l'état intérieur des personnages. Le tout est un très grand roman extrêmement efficace, glaçant de réalisme. Je vous en livre un extrait: "Et puis le lendemain matin, et ces saloperies de remords, et ce sentiment de culpabilité qui torturent votre corps couvert de sueur et accablent votre esprit sans qu'on puisse jamais les identifier clairement parce que vous les refoulez, vous les rejetez au tréfonds de vos entrailles pour qu'ils s'y noient, se perdent dans autre chose, n'importe quoi, pourvu qu'on n'ait pas à les regarder en face, à les reconnaître et à les accepter pour ce qu'ils sont." http://www.aubonroman.com/2010/07/le-...
What do You think about The Demon (2000)?
Hubert Selby Jr. now holds a very special place in my heart; be it a black, dirty place in my heart dripping in blood and other unmentionable secretions that craves stories about seemingly normal people that slowly descend into their own personal hell. Along with the sickly addicting subjects, Selby's writing style is something of it's own. After reading for an extended period of time, you start to feel like you are on some sort of crazy ride that is impossible to jump off of. I finally realized that this "driving" sort of feel to the book is supplied by Selby's lack of punctuation like periods. He is definitely a great American author!
—Melanie Ullrich
I read "The Demon" for the first time back in 2011, in one sitting no less. Anyone here read "American Psycho?" Okay, then you have a general idea already of who Harry White is and what he becomes. You can tell from around page 3 where this is going, but "The Demon" is one of those rare books which vindicates itself by making the ride worthwhile. It shows its work. It gives us the unbounded 'yes man;' someone who has been wildly successful in just about everything he has ever attempted, save for his relationship with his mother. Harry White has everything; a lucrative career, money, intelligence, athleticism, loving parents, sexual prowess. But, Harry's internal life is an unrelenting hell of addiction and guilt. He starts out hooked on sex, but as you might suppose, this incrementally progresses. Selby's diction is a broken stream of dialogue which does a brilliant job of conveying Harry's broken, anfractuous thought patterns and self-justifications until you come to see that the man is living a phantom hell under a guise of success. Lots of Selby's work is about love, about the artificial semblances which people substitute for real spiritual fulfillment out of necessity. Harry White is no exception. What this book does is it hands you the apotheosis of ideals. It says you want it, you got it. Infinite sex? Okay, here you go. No woman can say no to the charming, indefatigable Harry White. Fortune 500 status? All yours. A loving family? Sure, why not? It gives Harry White everything, bar nothing, that modern society (well, modern as of the 1950s) has to offer. But all of these things, to Harry White, are just appurtenances to destruction. They feed his habits, fuel his narcissistic rages, turn him from a generally decent, nice guy into something way worse. The verdict isn't an indictment of materialism like you'd expect, really. No, the verdict lays the responsibility for Harry White on the shoulders of everyone, no less Harry White himself. There were a million times where someone could have seen him, stopped him, helped him help himself because Harry knew that he was sick and wanted to get better, he just didn't know how. That's where the true tragedy of this book lies. The prose here is gritty, seedy, very intense. It's not for everyone. But it's also a universal story because everyone has the potential to become a Harry White. This one will haunt you.
—Brainstorm
Wow, that was an intense ending. I've read a couple of Selby's other books (Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream), and this one was different in that Selby chooses to write about the life of a man who ostensibly has everything he wants in life. In the other books I've read by Selby, Selby writes about drug addicts and thieves and explores desperate characters that an ordinary person would already presume to be a part of degenerative, base activities . What makes this book different from those is the fact that in this book, Selby explores the mind of Harry White, a successful Wall Street executive. Harry has everything he could want in life: a loving wife, a job that he loves, two young children that adore him, and yet he still finds himself constantly at odds with "The Demon" inside of him. "The Demon" inside of Harry is symbolic of a void that Harry feels in his life; as the book progresses, Harry has to go increasingly desperate measure in order to appease the demon inside of him. Selby does a masterful job of making Harry's descent into madness believable and somehow manages to make the reader feel empathy for Harry, who is basically a horrible human being. Selby is one of the best-- if not the best-- at getting into the heads of his characters. Selby's experiments with style and stream of conscious do wonders in getting into the head of a character, I don't know why more writers haven't tried adapting his style. By the end of the novel, I had a claustrophobic feeling of being inside of Harry's head, and the novel's haunting conclusion left me in awe of Mr. Selby's skills. Note: I would have given this book five stars, but the middle section was pretty lackluster and having read a couple of Selby's other works(which were masterpieces), I know that Selby could have tightened the middle section up and kept the intensity of the beginning and end of "The Demon" throughout the novel if he had wanted to. I most likely would have given 5 stars if I didn't know Selby's full potential.
—John Molina
