Steve's Interesting Experience

Steve's Interesting Experience

Bruce Von Stiers

Barry Maher is a motivational speaker and a blogger. His blogs have catchy titles such as Business Is Like Sex and How To Kill A Career.

Barry has also written a few books. Some of them have been business related and another is a novel that blends dystopia and horror. Now Barry has written a new novel that mixes early 1980's culture with the supernatural.

The title of the novel is The Great Dick and the Dysfunctional Demon. It was published by Crystal Lake Publishing. The novel is a bit long, coming in at 445 pages.

John Harris is a professor at Harvard. Or at least he was. He disappeared. But at his last class lecture, he equates The Great Gatsby to Moby Dick. It's a bizarre comparison, apparently fueled by a mind over enhanced by smoking pot.

This starts the novel off with a bang. Of sorts. At least you know from the start that this isn't going to be a boring, eyes can't stay open, kind of novel.

From this introduction, the reader next hops to March of 1982. A Sunday to be exact. The reader knows this because there is a section heading titled Two Women and a Corpse, along with the date I just mentioned. Barry breaks up the novel into both chapters and section headers.

Having travelled from Indiana to California, the narrator, Steve, is ready to ditch his female companion, Maria. They've stopped at her uncle's place. Steve writes a note for Maria, half-truth and half lie. He tries to get his jacket and leave. But he hears arguing and a painful shriek.

Then Steve comes upon a man attacking a woman. He tries to intercede and becomes entrenched in a fight to the death with the man. Then the other man utters some words in Latin and Steve responds, in Latin. What's that all about? And then the other man is struck by a trunk and his body in now nowhere to be found.

Then Steve sees the woman, standing over the man, with both hands on his body. After saying a few things, including that the man was dead, she shoves his body over the edge of a railing, dropping him into the water.

She introduces herself as Victoria Fairchild and Steve tells her his name is Steve Witowski. He picks up the knife that the guy was going to use on Victoria. It had strange carvings with a snakehead on it and three words in Latin.

Then Victoria has Steve walk her home. They end up at the cemetery by the church that Steve had been across the street from, at Maria's uncle's place.

Then the reader finds out that Victoria had recently lost her husband. He'd been some kind of self-help guru.

From there the novel moves along with Victoria offering Steve a job, helping renovate the old church building she's been living in.

But a supernatural type of thing happens to Steve as a tattoo appears on Steve's arm. It is of the guy that Victoria pushed over the railing. But that is only the start of weird things that happen.

There are hints at the supernatural all through the novel. From the title, you'd expect some kind of demon or demonic element to pop up somewhere along the way. I kept waiting for the big reveal, or some semblance of one, as I read along. But when it happened, I was taken by surprise by the reveal. It was quite a bit different from where I thought the novel was leading me towards.

Victoria had bought the church building because it had once belonged to this dude named Zandie. Back in the late 1800's, Zandie was some kind of a cult leader, with supposed supernatural abilities. He was purported to have been buried somewhere on the church property. According to legend, there was a book of spells buried with him. The book of spells, and other artifacts, could be very valuable and fetch a lot of money.

Along with the timeline of 1982, the novel moves back in time ever so often. The reader learns that Steve was a failed songwriter. And that he'd been in prison and was now a fugitive for something unrelated to his incarceration. Oh, and that Steve Witowski wasn't his real name.

Each section of the novel builds on the previous one, with interesting characters and situations appearing. There is Humpert, and later, Leo, who are assisting Victoria liquidate assets. There is O'Ryan, Maria's uncle, who seems to be a little bit crazy. And Maria's husband, Al, who shows up later in the story. There is also quite a bit about this guy, Zandie. It seems his cult was based on sex and the occult.

Steve keeps trying to get next to Victoria, but she keeps brushing him off. At the same time, she seems to be taking on lovers. Is Steve just not appealing to Victoria, or is something else, something nefarious, going on? Along the way, there are some bits and pieces of biting humor that help define the characters.

As I was reading the novel, I kept on trying to figure out just what was going on. I thought at one point that Victoria would turn out to be an incarnation of Aphrodite. Or that she was a succubus. Or that maybe, despite the title, the novel really wasn't about anything too supernatural. Like I mentioned earlier, the reveal was something that I hadn't expected.

The Great Dick and the Dysfunctional Demon is an interesting novel. Steve is like the loser in high school who wants to be with the hottest girl in school but just can't seem to get there. Victoria leads him on and then lets his hopes slip into the dust. And things are not even close to what they seem. The novel blends the loser mentality, lust, some biting humor and the supernatural for an extremely entertaining reading experience.

The Great Dick and the Dysfunctional Demon is available at amazon and other book retailers.

To learn more about the novel, and Barry Maher, visit his official web site at https://www.motivationalpresenter.com/

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