“So, Dr. McFay, can you tell me how you first became interested in the sex lives of demon lovers?”
Elizabeth is not a psychiatric doctor as one might easily assume. She is, in fact, “the dean of a college with a prominent folklore department,” the narrator and person to whom the question is addressed informs the reader. Hours on the book promotion circuit has prepared McFay for this question with the focus on the “sex lives” but she reckons Dr. Book is much more interested in the “demon lovers” aspect as part of her job as dean. Or, as McFay sees her, job interviewer.
Dahlia LaMotte had written a half dozen bodice-ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century—the kind of books in which a young girl loses her parents and then finds herself at the mercy of an overbearing Byronic hero who locks her up in a Gothic tower and makes threats against her virginity until he is reformed by her love and proposes honorable marriage.
Dahlia LaMotte is the novel’s fictional gothic romance writer from the past who keeps intruding into the present. The description here of the kinds of books that Dahlia wrote is a little cheeky bit of self-aware irony. After all, what is The Demon Lover but exactly that same kind of book all wrapped with postmodern edginess and the supernatural?
There were a lot of surprises in store for me that night, but the first was how easily Phoenix took to the idea that we’d both landed in a college populated by fairies, witches, and demons.
Our academic-minded narrator with the interest in the sex lives of demon lovers had job offers from bigger institutions of higher learning, mind you. But that great big juicy folklore department on the incredibly small campus of Fairwick College is just too enticing. In fact, for this lover of fairy tales and gothic bumps in the night, it turns out to be more than merely enticing; it is entrancing. The enrollment of 1600 students and 150 instructors proves to be far less than the whole story.
“Begone, incubus!
“I send you away, demon!
“I cast you into darkness, Ganconer!”
So, anyway, it turns out that Fairwick really is home to a demon lover. Or, as such spectral entities are known within the folklore department, an incubus. But this incubus, is he a fairy tale prince sort of demon lover from another realm, or is he a standard incubus? Because, of course, while the incubus is known to provide extraordinary sexual pleasure when they come to women in the middle of the night, their true purpose is generally much more malevolent. A price must always be paid for pleasure, after all.
