Prosper's Demon

By K. J. Parker

"As if Deadpool had slipped into the body of the Witcher Geralt." —The New York Times

In the pitch dark, witty fantasy novella Prosper's Demon, K. J. Parker deftly creates a world with vivid, unbending rules, seething with demons, broken faith, and worse men.

In a botched demonic extraction, they say the demon feels it ten times worse than the man. But they don’t die, and we do. Equilibrium.

The unnamed and morally questionable narrator is an exorcist with great follow-through and few doubts. His methods aren’t delicate but they’re undeniably effective: he’ll get the demon out—he just doesn’t particularly care what happens to the person.

Prosper of Schanz is a man of science, determined to raise the world’s first philosopher-king, reared according to the purest principles. Too bad he’s demonically possessed.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250260505

K. J. Parker

Having worked in journalism, numismatics and the law, K. J. Parker now writes for a precarious living. He is the author of Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Devil You Know, and other novels, and has won the World Fantasy Award twice. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.

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After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides the most satisfactory description of ruler. . . .

—W. S. Gilbert

I WOKE TO FIND her lying next to me, quite dead, with her throat torn out. The pillow was shiny and sodden with blood, like low-lying pasture after a week of heavy rain. The taste in my mouth was familiar, revolting, and unmistakable. I spat into my cupped hand: bright red. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Here we go again.

I crawled out of bed and tried to get my sleepy brain working. Some people are galvanized into decisive action by a crisis. I get all fogged up, like a cart stuck in soft ground; the wheels turn and turn, but no traction.

Blood spreads; you can’t seem to confine it, no matter how you try. So I took a leaf out of the First Emperor’s book and built a huge circumvallatory wall, out of fabric—sheets, curtains, the hangings off the walls, all my shirts except the one I was wearing (which was ruined, too, of course)—practically every fiber in the house. By gradually closing this cloth embankment in around the bed, I managed to keep the blood from getting on the walls and the doors, where it’d be sure to leave an indelible mark. Trust me, I know all about blood; every time a sheet or a curtain got soaked through, I wrapped it in something else and shifted it to the upper layer of the heap. The body itself went on the very top, like a beacon on a mountain peak. Luckily the floor was marble, about the only substance on earth blood doesn’t soak into permanently. I wrapped the body up in a beautiful and rather expensive Aelian rug I’d bought only a week earlier, then tied it tight with string.

To get the whole horrible mess out of the door, I used a modification of the travois principle: a heavy-duty coir mat, which I happened to have by me for some reason or other, with two holes stabbed in two corners to pass a rope through. It slid along quite nicely across the smooth marble floor and left only a few rusty brown streaks, which were no bother at all to wipe up afterwards. Out the side door, then just a matter of lifting the ghastly bale of ruined textiles and the rolled-up rug into my eight-hundred-gulden fancy chaise (served me right for indulging myself; I make a lot of money, and I’m always broke), harnessing up the horse, and off we went. There’s a worked-out quarry two miles or so from where I was living at the time. Sheer sides, deep, and the bottom is grown over with briars and withies and rubbish. I got the horse out of the shafts, put my shoulder to the back wheel, and sent my lovely expensive chaise tumbling over the edge. It disappeared into the tangle like a stone sinking in a pond. Job done.

On the ride home, I looked down at my hands, and I thought: It’s a bit much. If you can’t trust your own hands, what can you trust? Except I can’t, not after the last time, or the time before that. One of Them had crept inside me while I was asleep and taken control of my hands away from me, used them to murder a young woman, practically a stranger, whose only crime was a little commercialized affection. In this jurisdiction, the worst you get for that is a two-thaler fine and a morning in the stocks (and that’s excessive, if you ask me). Instead, a savage and violent death, at my hands. My hands, you bastard. I’ll have you for that.

My fault, for thinking I could get away with even a cash-down travesty of ordinary human feeling; my fault for involving a civilian. I thought about that and looked at my short, stubby fingers, used against me like a club snatched from a watchman’s belt by a violent drunk. Not my fault, I decided. Never mine. Always His.

* * *

I have an idea you aren’t going to like me very much.

That may prove to be the only thing we’ll have in common, so let’s make the most of it. I do terrible things. I do them to my enemies, to my own side, to myself. In the process, I save a large number of strangers (on average, between five and ten a week) from the worst thing that can happen to a human being. I’d like to say I do it because I’m one of the good guys, but if I did that, you’d see right through me. And then you’d quote scripture at me: Render to no one evil for evil.

Really? Even if they’re the enemy? Even if They’re not human?

You decide. Not sure I can be bothered with it anymore.

* * *

I have one thing in common with the Emperor: I was born into a certain line of work, without the faintest possibility of choice. A blacksmith’s son might just possibly decide to run away and enlist or join a troupe of traveling actors or pick cotton or beg on street corners. Not me. Like the heir apparent, I can’t just melt away into the crowd. I’d be recognized, found out, forced back to my honors and obligations. And as for not doing the work I was born to do; inconceivable. Might as well say, it’s entirely up to me whether I breathe or

Reviews for Prosper's Demon

[Lize Smith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very enjoyable story that ended much too soon. I would love a sequel.

[Corelainie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant storytelling and wordplay. Smart plot. I enjoy anti-hero characters and this one has it all - charm, witt, own moral codex. Love it.

[books9n9pickles · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A demon hunter's arch rival possesses someone he really, really shouldn't have... Very clever twist at the end! (Also an odd obsession with 60%?)

[andy5185 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dark, clever and fun. Want more! Looking forward to the next book coming soon.

[stormyhearted · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating, weird little novella with a narrator I don't particularly like (as he said I wouldn't) but can't help but enjoy anyway. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel!

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Demons are bad, but exorcists are almost as bad since it can be very harmful, even deadly, to remove a reluctant demon. Even though demons are immortal they take damage and feel pain when being ousted from a host. Then there's the complication that the demon can enter the exorcist and commit outrages. And the demons seem to be smarter and a pair have chosen hosts that it would be disastrous to damage.

[antao-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“It’s a bizarre but widespread myth that only heroes have good qualities, and the only qualities heroes have are good; villains are, by definition, all bad. Bullshit.” In “Prosper’s Demon” by K. J. Parker Actually many writers and others who went through that experience in WW1 and WW2, though they may have believed in good and evil, did not end up believing in wholly good or evil people - a very different thing. They had, remember, seen their own friends, on the "right" side, driven by war into behaving badly too. Try listening to Georges Brassens' song "La Tondue". He'd escaped from a German labour camp, been hiding out for months and returned to Paris, at the end of WW2, just in time to see the victorious goodies shaving the heads of young women who'd "collaborated" with the enemy. What it did for him was give him a belief that given the chance, most good people could act like bastards. A friend of mine whose grandfather served in the Spanish Civil War convoys, held much the same view. He had a story of picking up Republicans’ survivors only to find that as fast as they were hauling them out of the water on one side of the ship, some Norwegian sailors they were also carrying were knocking them on the head and chucking them off the other. He wasn't horrified by this, having seen how they'd suffered under the occupation; it just went to confirm his view. Really, this goes back to Euripides. In “Hekabe” he shows a noble queen, morally unhinged by unbearable grief, killing two young children in front of their father. What she does is evil, but she is not, intrinsically, evil; she has the potential to be both good and evil as do most of us, and any literature whether for adults or children that fails to acknowledge that would be a bit two-dimensional. What does acknowledge it, from Pullman to K. J. Parker, makes us think and stays with us far longer. “Prosper’s Demon” and Fairy tales like the Grimm Brothers' can be dismissed as being simply and reductively about good and evil--but only the narrowest of readings achieves this summation. What does a good, uncivilized folk-tale teach? Freud knew that it taught that the 'unheimlich' unreality of causal logic, the ambivalent power of wishes, and the brutalities of 'justice' reflected the '(un)heimlich' home life. Is the perilous world of the un-rational unknown a fantasy that can be dismissed once we've achieved rational materialism, or is our faith that human interests are reducible simply the product of another set of modern, reassuring fairy tales about the triumph of science and the transparency of market behaviors?What Parker does here is taking this concept to another level. We find it unimaginable to 'not exist' (if we’re possessed by a demon do we exist?), despite all the evidence that one day, we will cease to exist. The human mind is incapable of grasping this, yet religion is easy to grasp. It gives comfort. Satan, as a fallen angel, has been given many guises by man - who invented the concept. The most common is that Satan is the root of all evil, of deviance, of despicable acts. The less common is that Satan is a challenger to God, that he represent freedom - why shouldn't man be able to eat that apple? These constructs are the embodiment of man’s own struggle with emotions. If we take the idea of eternal life out of the equation, if we accept this life we have is all we have and when we die, we are gone forever, then religion falls apart. This is rational thinking. It is neither comforting nor non-comforting. It is based on the evidence we have. It is based on centuries of scientific discovery. Rational thinking is the way forward. To accept we are animals on this planet. The comfort in this, is that we won't know, because we will cease to exist. In a nutshell, you have proven my point that mankind is incapable of imagining not existing. I'm not talking about a generic 'humanity as a whole' concept, I'm talking about a deeply personal individual perception. Try to imagine not existing. It is impossible. The moment you try to imagine yourself in that position, you have failed at imagining it. The big deal about existence after death is what religion is based upon, because it is a very big deal. So many of us want to continue, or want another shot - it is far more comforting. It is also comforting that loved ones that have passed may be met again. It is probably the biggest deal we will ever face - in fact, it is the biggest deal. It doesn't get much bigger than life and death, does it?I have spent so much of my thoughts on this matter since my teenage years and this is about the best conclusion I could reach. It is borne out of age and experience. Religion can be a good thing. Reading Parker is also a good thing if you're into top-notch SF.SF = Speculative Fiction.

[jonez-6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.75

Thoroughly entertaining.

[fred_mouse · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Despite the protagonist being a piece of work, they were actually a fascinating character and an interesting viewpoint.This didn't save the book. I just bounced off it. The world-building is just off -- reminded me of people who were all 'but how do the goblins eat' when talking about particular types of Fat Fantasy. I spent too much time grumbling that it just didn't make sense, which given it was fantasy with demons just means that the author had lost the reader.