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A young man awakes from a recurring nightmare to find that, once again, his apartment has been destroyed: the TV is on fire, the mirrors shattered, the aquarium exploded with such force that shards of glass are embedded in the opposite wall; and once again a voice is saying, Come home... And so he does. Home is the small Maine town where his parents were both killed in a grotesque car wreck years before. The kind of town Stephen King has described as 'mostly indifference spiced with an show more occasional vapid evil-or worse, a conscious one.' A small town caught in a centuries-old war between supernatural forces. This is a genuinely frightening tale of death and demons, love and possession. show less

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2 reviews
In an afterword, the author describes how this book came to be. He was looking for a good horror read, scanned the shelves, read synopses, yada yada yada, and still couldn't come up with anything that reached out and grabbed him. So he decided to entertain himself & write the novel he wanted to read. I can feel his pain...normally I work very hard to find just the right horror novel to read. Demon Night, provides a small edge of suspense which I like in a good horror novel, and it definitely kept my interest.

Brief plot summary (no spoilers)
The book can be divided into three parts. In the first part, we meet the main character of the book, Eric Matthews, nee Langren, who is a drifter and who suffers from violent (and I do mean violent) show more nightmares. Eric wakes up from one nightmare in which he hears his father telling him to come home. Well, Eric's dad has been dead since Eric was 8, so he knows that he must drift a little more toward where he was born & lived until he was 8 -- a little town in Maine. We also meet the rest of the characters in the town.

In part two of this novel, weird things start to happen. Tempers are flaring, there is a bizarre murder/suicide, and other weird happenings. All of these events seem to coincide with the discovery and desecration of an ancient chamber in one of the town's caves. No one really knows what the heck is going on except Eric.

Obviously part three contains the climax of this book, but I don't want to go into that here just in case someone else decides to read this book.

I must have missed what the sealed up room in the church had to do with anything & I was kind of disappointed there, but the rest was pretty good. Considering it was a first effort, he didn't do too badly.
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774+ Works 14,402 Members
Joseph Michael Straczynski was born on July 17, 1954 in N.J. He is a writer and producer who has worked on films, novels, television series and comic books. He was the creator for the science fiction television series Babylon 5, its spin-off Crusade, as well as Jeremiah, a series loosely based on Hermann Huppen's comics. Straczynski wrote 92 out show more of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes. From 2001 to 2007, he was the writer for the long-running Marvel comic book series The Amazing Spider-Man. Straczynski began his career writing plays first for colege theater then professionally for Performance Publshing for an adaptation of "Snow White". During the late 1970s, Straczynski also became the on-air entertainment reviewer for KSDO-FM and wrote several radio plays before being hired as a scriptwriter for the radio drama Alien Worlds. Straczynski has also been an on-air personality. He began by doing a weekly entertainment segment on KSDO News Radio in San Diego from 1978-1980. In Los Angeles, he put in five years as on-air host of the science fiction talk show Hour 25. Straczynski was a fan of the cartoon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. He wrote a spec script in 1984 and sent it directly to Filmation. They purchased his script, bought several others, and hired him on staff. He also worked on other T.V. shows such as: The New Twilight Zone, Jake and the Fatman, Murder, She Wrote, and Walker Texas Ranger. In 2015 his title Superman - Earth One made the New York Times Best Seller List. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Demon Night
Original title
Demon Night
Epigraph
There's little good in small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil - or worse, a conscious one.
-- Stephen King
The conditions of a solitary bird are five;
The first, that it flies to the highest point;
the second, that it does not suffer for company, not even of its own kind;
the third, that it aims its beak to the skies;
... (show all)the fourth, that it does not have a definite color;
the fifth, that it sings very softly.
-- San Juan de la Cruz
Dedication
For Kathryn...for completeness
First words
It began as it always did.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It felt right, somehow.

Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, Horror, General Fiction, Fantasy
DDC/MDS
813.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English1900-19991945-1999
LCC
PS3569 .T6758 .D46Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
BISAC

Statistics

Members
150
Popularity
218,875
Reviews
1
Rating
½ (3.41)
Languages
5 — English, German, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian, Spanish
Media
Paper
ISBNs
8
ASINs
1