Nancy Garden’s Devils and Demons (1976) is another entry in the excellent Weird and Horrible Library from Lippincott. Let us pause a moment to appreciate the unsettling cover art by Stephen Gammell (of Scary Stories fame) and the use of the classic comic book color code for villainy: green and purple. This is another book I got out of my public library on the regular (well, once I convinced my mom to let me get a book about demons at all).
The book is as good an overview on diabolical folklore and its intersection with history as you’re liable to find, for young readers or no. One of the recurring rhetorical themes Garden uses is lamenting just how many devils and demons there are, but somehow, she manages to mention so many I don’t notice any major ones missing. And in addition to that, she tackles proto-devils from Mesopotamia, European witch hunts, the Knights Templar, possession and exorcism, demons outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, Goetic magic, the Faust legend and even Aleister Crowley and the modern Church of Satan. At the end, I can even squint and see the glimmer of the sensationalized murders that would eventually flower into the Satanic Panic. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say, but Garden ends with the long shadow of The Exorcist (1973) and I can’t help but wonder if that film’s success and permeation of pop culture didn’t spark the Panic. Perhaps that’s an obvious observation, but it hadn’t occurred to me previously.
One final fun thing: Garden has a list for further reading and suggests hitting the card catalog (!) for more, using search terms like “devil” and “demon,” but also “occult” and “supernatural.” “You know how tricky Old Scratch is,” she says, “you may have to hunt for him a little, even in the library.”
