The Lady Mephistopheles, Dean Patrick, TWB Press, horror

Stephen Paul is a raging alcoholic whose addiction suddenly manifests itself one cold Utah night in the form of a beautiful woman. Terra Drake, at first, seems warm and inviting, but she soon shows him the horrors she’d beset upon his small town, the murder of his next-door neighbor, the bewitching of his hairstylists, the freakshow the county fair had become, and the damnation of his priest in the new Church of Flies. She’s in cahoots with another demon, the Hooded Darkness, who stalks him at every turn, and the more he drinks, the more horror he sees and the more he blames them for the misery that has befallen small-town America. As his warnings to citizens and friends go unheeded, he strikes out on his own to defeat this ultimate evil, to save the world before hell itself comes calling.

IT’S HARD TO SAY WHEN it all started, when the bottom fell out of every facet of normal life in the empty jar called earth, in a small mountain town called Duncan. When the demon woman Terra Drake raced through nice and wicked like, when she tore out the hearts and souls of anyone coming near. When she told me she wanted to live in the real-time rage she called anger management. When neighbors turned into monsters, priests into warlocks, and ghosts rummaged through the night like rat savages in search of something sick to fill their hollow guts. When ghouls roamed the streets with nowhere to go but into the frozen underground to feed on the dead voles and the worms that fed on their carcasses. When carolers sang in chants so vile and filthy all the Christmas lights in town burned bright red until each bulb split apart like a mad boil. When the frightful chill of night seemed to never end, when the vastness of endless ink blasted out across the mountains, faces like spewed flashes of tortured, dying flames...all a blur of furious black gushing through every surrounding like dead tornadoes filled with dead tornado things, all of them swirling in messy, bloody, glorious dead gore that pummeled the deep Winter frosts of an eternity in the making. Only laughing gods did more than howl like wolves that anguished under the moons that splashed its reflection across the void of space to illuminate everything below. I wondered if there was any real meaning to any of it.