Title Conversations with the Devil Series --- Author Jeff Rovin Cover Art Christian Misje Publisher Tor - 2007 First Printing Tor - 2007 Category Horror Warnings --- Main Characters Sarah Lynch, Fredric Main Elements Demons

New York Times bestselling author Jeff Rovin has held readers in breathless suspense with his Tom Clancy's Op-Center novels. He has created compelling characters with vividly rendered emotions and actions. His page-turning thrillers have addressed questions of good and evil in our times.

Now, Rovin confronts the question of Good and Evil on the ultimate battleground. A human soul hangs in the balance, and thousands of years of religious teachings depict only the beginning of the fight for dominion over man. Psychologist Sarah Lynch is stunned when one of her young patients hangs himself. Evidence reveals that Fredric had become a Satanist. Intending to solve the puzzle of Fredric's death, Sarah attempts to conjure the devil--surely then she will understand what the teenager was thinking.

Sarah knows that belief in God and the Devil is a construct of the human mind and that people contain within them both good and evil. Her own family is the perfect example. Sarah's mother is still in denial about her dead husband's alcoholism, but acts as a wonderful grandparent to the son of the family's live-in housekeeper. Her alcoholic brother bounces from girlfriend to girlfriend and job to job, but always there when Sarah needs him. And Sarah herself? She lost her faith more than a decade ago, during a personal crisis. But she is dedicated to giving others the help she did not receive. Even the nun who is Sarah's best friend cannot break through Sarah's shield of cynicism.

But Satan can. The Devil himself rises in Sarah's office, sometimes a being of dark smoke and sometimes a creature of all-too-perfect, seductive flesh. Most disturbing is Satan's claim that only by following him can people find real happiness.

In the Devil's theology, God is a brutal, jealous bully. And as God and Satan battle for Sarah's soul, Sarah comes to believe him. She forgets that he is the Master of Lies . . . .

I picked up this book in the bargain bin some years ago, and when I added it to my to-read list for the year, I wondered why. Horror isn't really my thing, but figured since I had it I would give it a try.

And it wasn't my thing. First, it felt like it took forever to get to the interesting bits (I'm a reader of fantasy so I wanted to get to the demon raising part), and during that time I didn't really care much for the main character. Fredric was interesting mainly exactly because he was such a mystery, and I do like to read the occasional mystery.

And then the demon raising bit happened, and it was mainly a philosophical argument between Sarah and Satan. Is the Devil lying to us, or telling us the truth that God is just a big bully and that he's just doing his part to give us humans a break, to give us a chance to actually enjoy life instead of having all pleasure sucked out of it. There are a lot of tales nowadays about the devil being in fact a victim, just see the Lucifer TV show among others, even Milton's Paradist Lost starts off with the fallen archangel as a kind of sympathetic character. And after having read Dante's Divine Comedy, I will admit that Heaven looked a little boring, wouldn't trade it for Hell, but at least in Purgotory there was something to keep you busy as you tried to earn your way up the ladder, once at the top the only thing to do all day is sing hymns.

Anyway, won't get into the theological debate. It does get a little scary when you consider that if you are going to raise a demon, especially an ancient one with a million tricks up his sleeve and near divine power, that you just doodle some lines on the ground and it is enough to contain him. Of course it's not, and Sarah doesn't live alone and he starts messing with the other people in the house, getting a little boy to try to disarm a "bomb" by sticking a knife in an electrical socket for example. That part did get legitimately creepy and disturbing, enough that I would keep away from Ouija boards, let alone drawing pentagrams and reading out incantantions. Because while it could all be nothing, what if it's actually real. We think we know everything, but talk to any scientist and they will definitely let you know there is a lot we don't know, magic is just science we don't understand yet. And there is a lot of freaky science out there, from wormholes and quantum entanglement. And maybe beings that live on other planes or other dimensions can cross over as gods or demons. Anyway, whatever your beliefs, don't mess with the dark stuff.

Then we get to the final battle in the end, and...did I miss something? Did Sarah and her family actually defeat the Devil, who had by now be set completely loose, just by huddling together and shouting "Go back to Hell"? Was there supposed to be a deeper meaning like love conquers all or something? Anyway, it was dramatic and then it was like the Devil got bored and decided to just go home and wait for the next idiot to summon him up. After all people have been doing that for centuries so he probably only had to wait a couple of weeks for another Satanist to give it a go. Plus Sarah can't have been the first to mess up the ritual, so he's been free probably for as long as there were people trying to summon him.

Thus, since I didn't care about the characters, it wasn't fantasy enough for me, the philosophical debate interesting but not one I haven't come across before, and I have no idea how it ended, I didn't end up enjoying this read very much. Thus, from the bargain bin to the charity bin it will go, perhaps the next reader will enjoy it more.