In the corporate dystopia of the mid-21st century, Tim Kovak lives a sad, predictable life: he grew up poor in Texas, had a great girlfriend but lost her, and has never displayed any magical potential whatsoever. But on his 25th birthday, Tim receives the biggest surprise of his life: a succubus who claims she’s been bound to his family for centuries, and that he is heir to a line of immensely powerful mages.
Michael B. Duff’s TIMOTHY’S DEMON has a clear, accessible premise: a mediocre, “mundane” man is revealed to have immense magical power, which others must draw out of him (or take advantage of). This path is well-trod, but the text enlivens this structure with a few interesting decisions. Tim is poor, for instance, and not “lives under the stairs until he inherits a fortune” poor: he grew up in poverty in Texas, moved to Boston for work, and began a tech job for the promise of social mobility. There are schools of magic in this world, but TIMOTHY’S DEMON doesn’t devolve into classic magical pedagogy. Instead, these institutions serve as elitist foils for Tim’s actual journey. This realistic, recognizable class-consciousness is one of the best elements of the text. At an orientation event for a magical college, Tim takes in the fashionable dress of his peers and quips: “This crowd made me look like a delivery boy.” It was the imagery of clean-cut, well-dressed students on the school website—the promise of social mobility—that drove him to the event in the first place. The idea of temptation is central to TIMOTHY’S DEMON, especially once the succubus enters the picture, but it’s self-aware enough to note that sexual temptation in the 21st century has taken a backseat to others. Tim is tempted by his idea of a “normal” life: one in which he’s financially stable, nicely dressed, and has a sweet girlfriend who cares about him.
This desire for normalcy is well-positioned within the text’s excellent worldbuilding. Magic is publicly acknowledged and real in this world—although, in the modern day, it’s regulated by corporate governments and packaged into a “superhero” culture. Captain Cobalt is the Captain America analogue, a WWII hero; magical law enforcement teams respond to supernatural events. The result is a fascinating blend, positioned somewhere between Grossman’s The Magicians and superhero deconstruction like The Boys—including the latter’s propensity for hard-hitting, over-the-top action violence (described in satisfyingly visceral detail, bodies rending with sounds “like a buzzsaw chewing through something wet”). The action itself is fun, kinetic, and smart. Tim’s flexibility shines here. At first, the only spell he knows is levitation; but once he’s chatted with a hoverboard athlete, he quickly understands the potential applications of levitating off surfaces other than the ground. In short order, he’s able to execute this idea in combat, levitating himself (or his opponents) for advantage. The action scenes can be visually complex as a result, but the prose is clear throughout, letting the punches hit with real narrative weight.
TIMOTHY’S DEMON does have one sticking point: its first-person narrator/protagonist is bubbling with misogyny. Raised primarily by an abusive father, Tim has obvious and persistent anxiety about gender which pervades the text. Tim’s oldest friend is his ex-girlfriend Judy, who comes in for alarming criticism as she focuses on achieving her goals, improves her own self-esteem, and dates a conventionally attractive man. Meanwhile, the text affectionately shifts Tim back into the orbit of his tech-worker friends: an all-male group characterized by either patronage of strip clubs and porn (with a very backwards framing of sex work that construes the young men, flush with disposable income, as victims), or puritanical rejection of sex. This gender anxiety invades Tim’s language: he makes broad, essentialist claims about “every man” or “women like you;” when surprised he says “I screamed like a woman;” to have sex is to “be a man.” Tim is the first-person narrator, so it’s hard to escape his judgments about the world, and at times these misogynist attitudes flow into the rest of the story. Witches can be any gender, but witch magic is still strongly female-coded and notably “feelings”-based—at odds with academic, male magic. Lydia the succubus, frustrated by how modern men can no longer straightforwardly torture or murder people, describes their new way of doing evil as “feminine.” Layered atop this are plot threads in which Tim enjoys a series of unlikely encounters with uniformly beautiful women, now throwing themselves at him due to his evident power—what he himself describes in the narrative as “an improbable fantasy from erotic fiction.” The character work here is thin, and it feels like planned future developments (a sequel is hooked) are projecting back onto these earlier encounters with women (to the detriment of the internal logic). Fortunately, these threads are unimportant to the core plot, but their presence remains an unsettling distraction.
Overall, though, TIMOTHY’S DEMON is still a success. Its interesting, complex protagonist navigates a deep, compelling world of politics and magic throughout his journey of self-renewal punctuated with fun, imaginative action.
Michael B. Duff’s TIMOTHY’S DEMON is a richly imagined, agile debut with a satisfying blend of magical worldbuilding and smartly conceived action.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader
