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The track “Sun Ra and His Arkestra—Sun Song” is perhaps a pretentious, or at least curious, billing for a jazz LP, particularly when one is reminded that it was initially recorded around ten years ago. Titles of tracks, such as “Call for All Demons”, “Transition”, “Future”, “New Horizons”, confirm this impression. But the style and context of the music are anything but advanced, even for ten years ago; they are indeed quite traditional and affirm that Sun Ra is somewhat mislabelled as a leader in the trend. The music is not only traditional, it is professional—and, that being said, frequently slick, not to say frequently superficial and rather dull.

This is the longest chapter of the book, because of the number, nature, and importance of the philosophers that take the side of Plato and develop his teleological idealism in different directions. It also includes several early Christian thinkers – Augustin among them – whose philosophical background and inspiration are largely Platonic. For reasons of consistency, this chapter explores this complex and long-lived philosophical movement through the same categories that have been used in previous chapters, namely the conflict between immanence and transcendence, the questions of nature’s hierarchies, teleology and providence, as well as the origin of evil. However, new elements are introduced because of the puculiar reworking of these ideas within the new and original monotheism of the Judeo-Christian early tradition, as well as their importance for the later medieval and early modern philosophy.

This essay gives an engagement with Japanese manga and anime through Noriko Reider’s discussion of changing representations of oni, or demonic characters from different dimensions that provide a complex array of challenges and opportunities for the protagonists with whom they interact. The oni have their roots in Buddhist myths of supernatural beings who come from hell to terrify wicked mortals.

This chapter offers an example of how to productively teach Lynda Barry’s graphic narrative One Hundred Demons through the lens of ambiguity, which runs throughout Barry’s coming-of-age comix. Ambiguity of her intended audience (adults vs young adults), of the genre (autobiography, fiction, novel, art), and most especially of her ethnic and racial identity (white appearing with a Filipino extended family) saturate One Hundred Demons, in the collision of text, image, and color. The fluidity of ambiguity threaded in Barry’s comix allows students to enter and engage with the graphic narrative and to see the universal elements through the specificity of her story. The unique power of Barry’s graphic narrative lies in how well she is able to convey liminality: through pictures and words, Barry captures the heartbreakingly painful awkwardness of transitioning from childhood into adolescence and of being an other and an outsider, sometimes within her own family.

Even on his sixties and seventies, García Márquez still produced well-written narratives that explored male–female attraction and love. These novels pushed the customary boundaries of romantic experience and ultimately surprise readers along the way. These novels, Of Love and Other Demons and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, both depict a story between an older man and an early adolescent girl. Even though Of Love did not enjoy much fame compared to García Márquez's other novels, it is still complex and multilayered. The “secondary” characters are examined in more detail as they stand out as much as the two lovers in the novel.

This chapter begins with a brief look at Leo Tolstoy's symbolic geography. His is an imaginary landscape that is by no means structured around a provintsiia/stolitsa binary and is thus an exception to the rule that is the subject of this book. The overview of Tolstoy serves as background to a closer analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's geography, an analysis focused on Demons—a novel in which both the provintsiia/stolitsa binary and the trope of Russia's empty provinces take on great determinative power. If Dostoevsky at times recapitulates familiar images of the provinces, in Demons he also makes ideological use of them in ways that are strikingly original. He dwells on the essentialized difference between center and periphery in order to underscore how provincial isolation fosters a dangerous kind of intellectual vulnerability.

This chapter compares Demons and Brothers Karamazov as apophatic discourses that underscore the difficulty of belief, even among those who profess faith. Both of these novels demonstrate how the apophatic exercise can lead as easily to unbelief as to belief. If doubt is faith's constant companion, then for Fyodor Dostoevsky it is also a kind of dangerous but necessary goad. Indeed, unbelief is so strongly and convincingly articulated in his works precisely because it is also capable of revealing faith both dramatically and compellingly. Readers often learn the most about faith in Dostoevsky's works apophatically, that is, by discovering what it is not. It is within this context that the chapter explores two of the writer's most important Christological novels: Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, the latter of which reveals how the writer's apophatic approach is more pronounced than in any other novel.

This chapter analyzes and critiques the comparative method of three scholars who advocated the (virtual) nonexistence of Jesus: Bruno Bauer, Thomas L. Brodie, and Richard Carrier. It exposes an assumption of antiquity that has been carried over and accentuated in modern times: that the historical connotes the “real” or “true”; thus to be historical is to be true. If something is thereby not historical, but a combination of mythic motifs, it is not real.

This chapter compares two different modes of deploying intertextuality in autobiographical writing by analyzing the relationship between textuality and experience in Alison Bechdel’s comic autobiography Fun Home and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!. It first considers the tensions in Bechdel’s sophisticated use of intertextuality, focusing on her awareness of the way her chosen intertexts work imperfectly as a means of describing and understanding her own experiences. It then offers a reading of One! Hundred! Demons! and Barry’s technique in depicting suicide, as well as her notion of texts as magic lanterns. It also explores Barry’s use of intertextuality as a means of interpolating the reader, of modeling textual engagement and turning readers into writers.

This chapter argues that the remarkable success of the Observations owed much to the subtlety and skill with which its author tapped into a complex web of pre-existent ideas about the supernatural. Notions of the dog as a witch's attendant spirit, or ‘familiar’ – from the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in 1324-5 right up until the trial of the Lancashire witches in 1634 - are discussed in depth, and particular attention is paid to the possibility that poodles and spaniels may have been regarded with an especially suspicious eye by contemporaries. The influence of a series of polemical works which were produced during 1641-42 – and particularly of the anti-puritan satires of John Taylor, the ‘water poet’ – on the author of the Observations is also explored. [125]

Here I speak of the “Plotinian Imaginary”, as it can be distinguished from the world as we “moderns” imagine it to be. Our Imaginary encompasses far more than can easily be perceived, or even proved: dinosaurs and dark matter, artificial minds and interstellar empires. But most of us are confident that demons and the Olympian gods are fictions, that the earth is in orbit around the sun, that magic and astrological predictions do not work, and that “the real world” is the one we ordinarily perceive (although we are also confident that the real world uncovered by scientific enquiry is unimaginably vaster and more odd than ever we suspected). The question in interpreting and developing the Plotinian story then becomes whether we can adapt his methods and conclusions to our own very different world, or whether instead we might profitably “imagine ourselves” back into his. What, in particular, can be made of his references to ‘daimones’, and what might it mean to think of ordinary life as a dream, from which we might reasonably expect to wake?

This essay considers non-diegetic representations of joy and suffering in The Idiot and Demons—fragmentary interludes that have a contrapuntal relation to the constraints of narrative, character, content, and duration. In the language of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the fragment is a “sub-work” or “superwork,” “an essential incompletion” that is also a “totality.” In distinction to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, the representations of suffering and joy considered in the essay are not based on an exchange economy in which “happiness is bought by suffering.” Joy is a “here eternal,” without recourse to a redemptive theology.

This chapter transitions from language to concerns about embodiment and bodily boundaries, as it ethnographically depicts and addresses speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia), healing, and demonic attack as instances of the diagrammatic miraculous. It concludes by arguing that demonic attack is a potential involution of the charismatic diagram, where the relation between constituent elements of the diagram become indistinct, and where the force of surprised becomes associated with willful or unwilling forces, instead of catalyzing willing forces.

This chapter discusses how Ramsey Campbell broke free from the influence of H.P. Lovecraft through his work, the ‘Demons by Daylight’ (1973). His ‘The Childish Fear’ (1963), ‘An Offering to the Dead’ (1963), and ‘The Reshaping of Rossiter’ (1964), suggests that he was in search of new focus, but these works were not significantly successful. Despite this, Campbell continued to aim for a new type of weird fiction; something that would continue to refer to the older motifs but would still be able to present modern concerns such as the interplay between the mind, emotions, and the imagination, a theme which first appeared in his work the ‘Demons by Daylight’ (1973).