Stephen Graham Jones

Demon Theory

DTDescription from the old defunct gone-forever MacAdam/Cage website:

On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. While there is no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, and has been waiting a long time. Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes and experimental nuances, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references, and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy too real to dismiss. There are books about movies and movies about books, and then there’s Demon Theory.

 Before you get any further : Hopefully you can find an old hardcover or trade paperback of this, as it’s out of print. However, the ebook of it’s not only what I would consider stolen, but the kindle version is also just extremely poorly done, from the early days of e-booking. The Google Books version looks all right, though. Could be the other e-platforms are cool as well, aside from being stolen. 

[ just saw that a lot of this cluster of links below are broken. an initial search suggests they might be lost forever. after a more thorough search, I’ll sadly delete the ones that are broken . . . [3.18.18] ]

Sample | Afterword |  Quiz | Trailer |  Intervw | Avatars |  Banner | Discuss |  Discuss More |  DT Suite (#eng331demon) |  where the title’s from |  a love connection | the comic

. . . akin to watching horror director Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy with David Foster Wallace whispering in your ear . . . ingenious — Dallas Morning News

The conceit is fairly audacious, but Jones, an unapologetic pop-culture savant, seizes the opportunity to recast thriller clichés into a madly entertaining landmark of literary horror . . . Demon Theory is subversive and indispensable—there is genius at work here. — Mike Shea, Texas Monthly 

Forget the teen slasher films of the 90’s, and no one really cares what happened last summer anymore. Jones spanks them all soundly and puts them to bed without supper in all of their pithy and overly verbose language . . . And he does it with style, guiding the reader along the twisting corridors of terror. What comes across is not only a chilling story, but also the wit and intelligence of Jones, leading the reader along on a guided tour of pop culture and extreme fear. — Scott Johnson, DreadCentral

What he’s crafted is at once a love letter to the genre as a whole and to the hardcore fans who live and die for horror films, cult history, and the darker side of life in general . . . easily one of the best horror novels I’ve read in the past decade as it seamlessly mixes monsters and human frailty with a thorough dissertation on horror as a genre and pop culture in general. — Mike Bracken, the Horror Geek

Links:

wraparou8nd for the SST special edition; an article on it

Back to the content: I really didn’t mean to be a thief, but apparently—was just rewatching (in 2014), caught this—I may have stole Jenny’s charcoal demon-sketches on her bedroom wall scene from X-Files‘ “Grotesque” episode (3×14):

DT_X

Looks like I was stealing more from that same time-period as well. This is Twin Peaks (2×2):

screen-shot-2016-10-27-at-12-43-23-pm

And, here’s Demon Theory with Delicia Williams on pencils:
DTcover2.0 (718x1024)

How a lot of the footnotes work

https://youtu.be/umqHaOctslo

After a while, you’re seeing Demon Theory everywhere, even at highway speeds:

DT

Here’s something Theo Van Alst found. Looks suspiciously DT-ish . . .

and, out of context, this could be very DT (it’s a [clickable] screengrab from Howl):

nina

and, this is pretty much the Oz-demons Jenny and Hale dream up:

Hey, wow: A Demon Theory gif:

giphy

And it’s still around in 2021:

https://twitter.com/lcheckas/status/1452334901123067919?s=20