Synopsis:
Aspiring musician Ruby Tucker has had enough of her small rural town and dysfunctional family. But a falling out with her best friend and bandmate has killed her dreams of escaping and making it big in the Atlanta punk scene.
While helping her eccentric neighbor organize his religious artifacts, an ancient ring clamps down on her finger―possessing her with the spirit of a blood-thirsty demon. There’s no exorcizing it unless hundreds of people chant a spell to set Ruby free. And what’s worse, the ring is a beacon for evil, drawing an unimaginably wicked mob straight to Ruby, hungry for her flesh.
If Ruby can get her band back together, she has a shot at salvation. It’s time for her to face the music and put her whole soul into a song―one powerful enough to raise some Hell.
Review:
One would be forgiven for recognizing certain glaring similarities between Evil In Me, Brom’s latest occult novel, and Slewfoot, his 2021 hit. Both involve a young, rebellious woman who refuses to bow to the strict religious culture that surrounds her. Both involve demons and a richly imagined cosmology. Both pit our heroine against hypocritical patriarchs. Both have spooky yet adorable demonic sidekicks that aid our heroine on her journey but are, perhaps, not quite her friends.
Yes, in its rough outlines, Evil In Me looks like familiar ground, but the experience of reading is so vastly different, that it serves as a great reminder that ideas are dime a dozen and execution is everything.
While Slewfoot is set in 17th century New England, amid panic about witchcraft, Evil In Me is its own kind of period piece, set in the 1980s rural south, amidst the “Satanic Panic” of its own age, and in the center of this charged moment is Ruby, a mid-twenties wwoman with some mental health concerns and some complex family dynamics.
When we meet Ruby, she has just decided to go off of her lithium, mere days before her parole ends. Not a bad way to get a plot started, that.
But while one part of Ruby is at war with everyone and everything around her, the other part is acting as caretaker for an elderly Jewish man who is himself caretaker to a bizarre collection of occult memorabilia. One item in this collection is a ring that sometimes looks like a spider and sometimes looks like an eye, and when it calls to Ruby, our woman of zero inhibitions answers.
This connection to the rings sets off a rapid fire series of events that continually ramps up the stakes for Ruby, as she finds her self not only inhabited by a demonic presence but also hunted by that demon’s master, the owner of the ring.
Soon, the story turns into a road trip as Ruby flees to Atlanta to meet up with her old friend and bandmate, perhaps the only person left who might help her. Together, they do what anyone would do in such a situation: they get the band back together.
Oh, there’s also a serial killer who finds himself obsessed by Ruby and the odd, demonic music that emenates from her, as well as a gung ho step-father on the hunt. It’s a lot.
But unlike Slewfoot, Evil In Me is mostly just silly fun. There’s a lightheartedness to the whole affair, even when people are being tortured and killed, that gives it all a kind of popcorn movie feel. That’s not a criticism, either. Evil In Me is fun and wild and deeply imagined, and maybe it ends just before reality can reassert itself, but we wouldn’t want it any other way.
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