The White Devil by Justin Evans

Published by Harper on May 10, 2011

Not being a fan of many ghost stories not written by Edgar Allen Poe, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The White Devil.  Made curious by a description that painted the novel as something more than a horror story, I began reading it with some fear that I might find it too dull to finish.  Exactly the opposite occurred.  Within the first few pages I was drawn into the narrative by the intelligence and wit that Justin Evans brings to his writing.  While it isn’t perfect, The White Devil is more complex and of higher literary quality than an ordinary tale of the supernatural.

The White Devil mixes a coming-of-age story with one of midlife redemption, adds the spice of sexual tension, and yes, tells a ghost story, but one with a twist that even Poe might have admired.  Yet the quality of the writing in The White Devil appealed to me more than the story.  The characters are carefully crafted, filled with interesting quirks and inner turmoils that grabbed my interest.  Events unfold at a rapid pace; the novel is a quick and easy read.  Yet The White Devil never filled me with sense of menace and foreboding that the best thrillers deliver.  Perhaps I was too far removed from the story, unable to envision myself threatened by a ghost at a British boys’ school, or perhaps the nature of the threat was so unlikely that it failed to conjure a sense of dread.  The best horror fiction appeals to both the cerebral and the primal mind; The White Devil left my primal fears untouched.

Ghost stories require the reader to suspend their disbelief, but The White Devil demands more from a reader than a willingness to believe in ghosts.  The story depends upon unlikely coincidences, beginning with the character Andrew’s uncanny resemblance to the poet Byron.  All the buildup leads to an ending that I thought was a bit too easy.  In fact, the ending all but abandons minor characters, which I found a bit frustrating.  Still, I was carried along by the stories within the story, by the interactions of the characters, and by the clever conceit that practically makes Byron a character in the story.  For all of those reasons, I liked the novel enough to recommend it, but not enough to rave about it.

A brief warning to readers who don’t want to encounter acts of physical intimacy in a novel, particularly when they involve teenagers:  there’s a fair amount of fooling around in this book, and while I wouldn’t consider the descriptions graphic, some readers might.  To me, those scenes seemed well suited to the novel, but I know that some readers would be offended by them, and they should know of the book's content before deciding whether to read it.

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