Dan, the protagonist of Massimo Marino’s Daimones, along with his wife Mary and their daughter Annah, wakes up one morning to find that everyone around him is dead, that indeed all of the human race, aside from the three of them, seems to have been killed off in a flash. No clues immediately avail themselves, and the isolated family tries to find other survivors. When they do, all things seem to point to a race of mysterious beings.
Daimones suffers from a number of problems, one being the pacing. It’s not meant to be a conventional adventure story, and it doesn’t even have to be, but there’s really no getting around the fact that, between the apocalypse and the family meeting their first survivor (which is about half the book), not a whole lot happens. The narrator is also unlikable, occasionally taking to time to pontificate in a pseudo-intellectual fashion on post-apocalyptic world: “Time oozed away, flowing like lava erupting lazily from a vent, slowly and impossible to stop, covering everything into oblivion under its dark layer of things that were and will never be again” [158]. He goes on like this for the whole book, with his combination of clichés and poetaster observations.
The biggest fault, however, is in the ending, which manages to be simultaneously flawed in aesthetic, logical, and even moral ways, all incredibly profoundly. It’s supposed to be a paradigm shift, and instead is a combination of the ending of Plan 9 from Outer Space in terms of its undeserved sympathy for mass-murdering aliens, and the ending of the last episode of Battlestar Galactica for its utter naivete and implausibility.
Daimones could have been good, but ultimately betrays itself. It’s a book that creates an immense amount of potential early on: people dead everywhere, mysterious ethereal beings, etc.; and squanders it, especially with the bizarre and ill-conceived ending.
Reviewed by Chaz Baker for IndieReader