Seven Demons Worse, Authored by Ewen Harris

Synopsis: The story of Huston Evans, protagonist of Seven Demons Worse, is offered in three parts. Part One shows Evans just after the untimely death of his wife, a strictly non-academic type who had brought gentleness and common decency into his life. In a blind, smoldering rage against the campus community which scoffed at her (and against the God who took her away from him), Evans embarks upon a strange program of revenge: he begins accepting the sexual propositions (as he had never done in the old days) of his avant-garde colleagues. The chapters of this section are named after figures from Greek myth who incarnate the essential quality of each flirtation—except for chapter one, "Tydeus". This mythic warrior was so blinded by fury that his dying act was to take a bite out of an enemy: Evans similarly begins his "new life" of destruction by physically threatening his odious boss and savoring the thrill of a power unhampered by any scruples. Then he takes up with the lonely, unreserved Felicia, called "Kalypso" after the island goddess of the Odyssey whose thousand embraces do not suffice to restrain her castaway-lover. The confident and politically formidable Gervaise, with her short skirts and shorter hair, is "Kirke", the sinister temptress who turns men into beasts: her art of sensuality very nearly drives Evans’s vengeful designs right out of his head. Having barely escaped from her magic, he enters into a truly loathing "love affair" with Emily, another political dynamo on campus, yet so self-absorbed that her superior beauty does nothing to make her less repellent. Her chapter is called "Megaira" after the horrible hate-driven fury.

By now, Evans has already begun to acknowledge to himself to futility of this vengeance, and to suspect that behind it lurks a longing for self-destruction. He attempts to snap out of his moral tail-spin. Unfortunately, his new habit of life is not so easy to dispose of. In "Ariadne" he walks away from two kind-hearted women from his past who wish only to find something like love (just as the mythic Theseus deserted the princess of that name who sacrificed all for him). Still looking desperately for a way out of the moral labyrinth wherein he has plunged himself, he renews a relationship with Jane, a diffident woman with profound psychological problems which keep her from wanting any man she might have. Evans had loved her once before, and he seeks now to renew that love and advance it toward permanence in marriage; yet their immediate sexual intimacy seems to rob him of his former mystique for Jane and to render him suspect to her. As "Daphne" turns into an olive tree beneath Apollo’s groping hands, so Jane receives Evans’s proposal with wooden indifference.

Finally, Evans has had his fill of an insane quest. The semester is winding down as Part One concludes; but before Evans can escape the campus, he is compelled to meet with his one-time mentor, Elliot—after whom the chapter "Teiresias" is named. Elliot, too, is a kind of blind seer who haunts the Underworld. He is always ahead of his protégé in political matters, but he cannot comprehend Evans’s moral reluctance to dance the mad dance of campus life in pursuit of success. The rupture of this fragile friendship puts the finishing touch upon Evans’s spiritual exhaustion.

For Evans has just suffered the further shock of losing his mother. A stoical woman who always exacted the utmost from her son, the mother’s influence is vaguely the subject of Part Two. More directly, this section sees Evans return home to a small southern town for the funeral and for the subsequent settling of affairs. "Hypnos", or Sleep, traces his trance-like journey through these hours in the company of his younger brother Mace, a person who has remained largely a stranger to him. Upon taking him back to the airport, Evans discovers both that Mace is married and that the couple is expecting its first child—secrets which the mother’s prejudices forced Mace to bottle up until now, since his wife is Hispanic.

Stung by his own unfairness to this innocent stranger of a brother, Evans is now poised for a plunge into despair deeper than any he has taken on campus. He reaches out to formal religion in "Oneiros" (Dream); or rather, it reaches out to him in the person of SuEllen, the self-appointed greeter of the local church’s singles ministry. She had known him before, and she clearly wants to rope him in to her personal projects for happiness this time around. He has no great trouble resisting her attempted seductions, but he does allow himself to be talked into attending church. There, in "Kokytos" (the Wailing river of Hell), he is treated to a sermon explaining all pain and suffering as failure to put enough into the collection plate. The perversion here of basic Christianity is so revolting to him that he loses his bearings entirely. Only the naïve Sharyn stands by to keep him company, a simple country girl who attaches herself to him during Sunday school and persists in offering to help him set things in order. He gives into her in "Moira" (the goddess of fate), and events do seem to pursue the same old climax with a fate-like inflexibility. Though he has vowed to make no more sexual experiments, he ends up in Sharyn’s bed, more confused than ever and now convinced that he is truly an unrepentant, irredeemable man. In "Lethe" (another underworld river: Oblivion), he passes several deeply introverted days at his mother’s house, mulling over old letters, contemplating the utter futility of his life, and trying to write Sharyn a note explaining that he did not intend to enjoy her and discard her. When SuEllen calls in the middle of his gloom and insists that he give her a chance to compete with Sharyn for the Prize, he hangs up angrily and leaves town blindly.

Part Three, then, opens as Evans is on the road to a destination unknown even to himself. He drives for hours until he must pull over to sleep, during which spell he sees his deceased wife Sheila in a dream and realizes that he has never conceived of her continuing in another reality. When his trek resumes the next morning, he recognizes his objective in the vast nothingness of the New Mexican desert (a sea of sand from which the chapter draws its name, "Thalassa"—Sea). He spends the next several days simply picking through the surroundings of a tiny town while staying at a motel. The desert’s nothingness is slowly becoming a wealth of courage, simplicity, and silent suffering represented not just by nature, but also by its human inhabitants. The chapter title "Aster", Star, is drawn both from the infinite beauty which he discovers in the night sky and from the name of the woman Stella who single-handedly runs the motel where he stays and holds her family together. At the end of this chapter, Evans’s heart finally melts. In his tears, he understands that he has demanded a comprehensible and finite happiness from God rather than accepting that the world’s misery is deeply rooted in men’s hearts.

As a way of recommitting himself, Evans sets off into the desert at sunrise the next day. His intention is to do a kind of penance, one which involves bodily suffering—perhaps death—rather than saying empty words. But as he proceeds, he grasps that this passionate act of devotion is, after all, misplaced. Walking sixty miles in a desert is actually far easier than entering the world and combating wickedness. By midday, he has resolved to carry his trek no farther, but to retrace his tracks literally and figuratively. In particular, he knows that Sharyn will accept his offer of marriage, and he knows that in her he will find a simple heart with whom he can begin to build an entirely new life. This chapter is named "Helios", the Sun, both for the desert and also for the inner light which streams upon Evans’s being.

The final chapter, "Gaia" or Earth, does indeed bring Evans back to earth (which is of course where God put us and means for us to live). He is opportunely spotted and picked up by a couple of roving geologists whose unconsciously comic friendship opens another side of existence to him, a life not without intelligence but quite without the campus’s worship of pseudo-intelligence. The story ends as he dials Sharyn’s number late that evening. One senses that his new beginning is well under way.

The cryptic chapter titles, then, make of the story something of an allegory. Harris clearly intends for the book to be read as a kind of morality play, if not an epic: a story, that is, which has happened thousands of times and will happen thousands more if we merely change a few names and circumstances.