Third Review: Kyell Gold's Red Devil!

Your host returns, perhaps sooner than expected, and I come with apologized for my erratic posting schedule. Hopefully, as I grow more used to maintaining this account, I'll be able to come up with a regular schedule. At any rate, though, I would like to pick up where I left off in my last post: narratology and Kyell Gold's Red Devil (2014). In this post, I want to show an arguably weak use of narratological perspective shift in fiction writing.

Released two years after Green Fairy, and taking place only around a month or two after the events of the prior novel, Red Devil follows a new protagonist named Alexei, a good friend of Sol, who is also present in this novel. Alexei's story follows him as he struggles to acclimate to America, having immigrated during high school in an attempt to escape his homophobic parents; despite this freedom, he struggles with his own introverted personality and obstructive lack of confidence. In an effort to receive help from the outside, Alexei attempts to invoke the same ghost who invaded Sol's dreams in the previous novel, though who he gets is someone else entirely.

Like Green Fairy, Gold again uses dreams and point of view shifts to tell the story. However, the strategy Gold employs in this novel is different, and weakens the storytelling. This is because, from the beginning of the novel, the new ghost's story is presented to the reader in the form of personal storytelling and diary entries; the prime difference between novels here is that the story of this novel's ghost is presented exclusively to the reader.
To remind you readers, Green Fairy's plot came into being from its protagonist reading a memoir that told a man's perspective of events leading up to him committing murder--the ghost that invades the protagonist's dreams, and later his waking life, in order to show his own perspective is the man who was murdered. In Red Devil, though, Alexei does not know who his ghost is, and is not aware of the ghost's perspective in any way. There is no level of attachment for Alexei to gain until further into the novel when the ghost intentionally reveals himself and selectively tells Alexei bits of his backstory and what he wants. While all of this goes on, though, the reader is consistently learning more about both Alexei's ghost and Sol's. I can offer some level of acknowledgement to the use of situational irony--the reader is aware that Alexei's ghost is the father of Sol's while the characters themselves do not know until towards the end of the novel. However, unlike common uses of situational irony, it isn't utilized in a way that evokes shock value, it simply brings forth the ghost's true wants and weaknesses to the other characters.

Ultimately, despite this criticism, though, Red Devil remains my favorite of Gold's Dangerous Spirits trilogy. We will not, however, discuss the third book on this blog, at least not yet!