Explore The Bedeviled Compiled By Thomas Cullinan Classified In Readable Copy

paced, unsympathetic characters, terrible dialogue, The fact that a sixteenyearold in thes constantly called his mom “mother” gave off some real Buster Bluth vibes, The protagonist is certainly one of the most unpleasant matriarchs Ive encountered, but not in a delightfully evil way just a crummy, selfabsorbed parent.
Rosemary's Baby meets Let's Scare Jessica to Death,
This was a fast read appropriate for spoopy season but I wish there had been a bit more here, I don't love unreliable narrators and would way rather have seen more Civil War era devil worshippers and taboos broken than spend my time in the head of someone acting stupid as well as erratic.

Probably closer to.thanstars. Maggie Caine and her family left the rat race of suburban Westchester, where her husband's job as an advertising copy writer was slowly killing him, to live in the Caine ancestral home, an old farmhouse in Ohio, ten miles from the nearest neighbor.
The first night they were there, the hellish curse descended upon them, . .

Her teenage son was possessed by the spirit of a Civil War general who had been a Satanist, She was possessed by the spirit of the General's mistress,

And in the night, the General came to her, . . Disappointing

I was loony forward to reading this book after finding it on some web listicle of scary novels, but it just didn't land for me.
Maggie's actions never seemed to come from someone with a personality, Nothing she did made sense given what we knew about her character, There were some spooky elements in the story, but overall it just didn't hold together enough for me, The author writes dialog decently though, Did not finish. So annoying with ridiculous and unbelievable behavior from characters and poor dialogue, Couldnt take it anymore and had to quit, Thomas Cullinan never disappoints. This is the kind of book thats scary and fun at the same time, Really enjoyable! Civil War themes meet horror story meets The Exorcist, with some nice twists and turns, It was interesting to see how he took the themes from his historical novels sitelinkThe Beguiled and sitelinkThe Besieged both highly recommended and intertwined them with modern days.
Thank you, Valancourt Books for the new edition and making this story accessible to readers again, This was as good of a ghost story as I've ever read! Definitely keeps you guessing, I have always loved wellwritten ghost stories with a Gothic atmosphere, and The Bedeviled falls into that genre, Told from the pointofview of Maggie Caine the wife and mother of this story, the first chapter hints about the grim ending.
The narrative sucked me in by the end of page one, and little did I know then that I was about to enter a world of Civil War ghosts, the occult, incest, possessions, and murders.


The Bedeviled is a sick and twisted story, and I loved reading every word, Thomas Cullinan weaved together the right blend of Southern Gothic, horror, and family drama, I'm surprised Hollywood has never attempted to adapt it though it would never be as good as the book, This was very meh for me, There is a definite ick factor to part of the storyline, but overall I was quite underwhelmed, Good old fashioned haunted house, demonic possession, Satanic cult novel, Interesting characters and engaging plot, Highly recommended. This book is likely best appreciated by going in cold, allowing the reader to get maximum creep factor from the unfolding events.
Stylistically bizarre maybe because of our narrators POV, filled with rather unpleasant characters and uncomfortable revelations, Not Ray Russell levels of nasty, but provides the right level of occult misanthropy for those who like that flavor combo, I am always looking for some interesting's horror and this one caught my eye since I'd already planned to eventually read Cullinan's THE BEGUILED.
It has a lot of the themes you see in's horror while not feeling at all like a retread,

Our narrator is Maggie Caine, a middleaged housewife, married to a man she doesn't particularly care for, She cares about her two children, teenaged Duff andyearold Frannie, and yet she seems to hold them, and everyone, at a remove.
One of my chief pleasures was how different the family and parenting norms were, you would never see a first person narrator who is a mother write this way now.


Maggie's husband Jack is dissatisfied with city life and

decides to move them all back to the land, to his family homestead, after it becomes vacant upon the death of the elderly relative who lived there.
There are more than your fair share ofs horror stories about this, but seeing it through Maggie, who doesn't feel any particular compulsion to leave, is a nice twist on the familiar story.
Jack, who decides he's going to write a novel, would normally be our protagonist, blithely ignoring the rest of his family as they slowly get sucked into destruction.
But here it's Maggie, who sees more clearly than anyone else just how everything is going wrong,

Duff, a scrawny, bookish high school senior who plays the flute, begins acting strangely not long after their arrival at the old house.
The neighbors are odd, and Maggie keeps catching them in lies, The town has whispers of Satanism as well as a shrine that was allegedly the site of a miracle, but the priests are not convinced the miracle was wrought by God.
And Maggie begins to see what she thinks might be visions of a man in a union uniform, a man she begins to believe is her husband's grandfather, General Caine.


Maggie writes from just after the events of the book, and often foreshadows what lies ahead, Cullinan is excellent about doling out these little insights, which let you know terrible things are coming but also distract you from the terrible things you didn't get warned about which surprise you along the way.
There are some excellent twists and plenty of subversions of the usual tropes, The priests here are relatively useless as religious practitioners, and they don't seem to think these stories of Satanism are actually true.
Maggie herself is a nonbeliever and lapsed Catholic, not one to go looking for an exorcism, Because Maggie has a limited point of view, we don't get too bogged down in the lore or the reasons, we just get to see things through her, even as she starts to realize she cannot trust her own perspective.
This unreliability also helps to explain many of Maggie's choices, which would be hugely frustrating in a protagonist who was fully aware.


A real gem, I'm glad to have found it and now I have more of an incentive to read more from Cullinan.


I read the new audio edition from Valancourt Books, and found narrator Linda Jones a great fit for the material.
.