Call Him Demon
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
In the 1920s a group of children staying at their grandmother's house realize that one of the uncles who lives there is not a real person, and only arrived there a few weeks before. He is able to exert some kind of mental influence over the adults of the household, which makes them believe he has always been a member of the family. The Wrong Uncle, as they call him , is a kind of projection -- or, more precisely, a detachable limb in human form -- of a creature which lives in a cavern deep beneath the house, accessed by a portal in the attic. The thing has only two emotions: hunger and satiety, and it only eats raw meat
Reviews with the most likes.
Call Him Demon by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1XG0QXU19O0RV?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Kuttner and Moore, husband and wife, were a gifted writing team, turning out numerous classic short stories during the 1940s and 1950s. Kuttner died tragically young, and Moore, who may have been the more gifted writer of the pair, stopped writing.
This story features the traits that made their writing so powerful. The story opens with Jane visiting her grandmother's home and reckoning a time she spent as a six-year-old with her relatives. For unexplained reasons, an alien presence has inserted itself into the home as a “fake uncle.” The parents are oblivious to this imposition, but the children know. They've been feeding the other half of the entity in some odd parallel reality. When they stop feeding the entity, things turn tragic.
Kuttner and Moore were acolytes of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, they met through their Lovecraft connection. This book reflects the “cosmic horror” themes of Lovecraft, the innocence of the world jammed up to an evil that endures through time.
In some ways, the story is impenetrable in terms of logic, but that is part of the point of the story. The logic in the story is explicitly the logic of children.
