Call of the Jersey Devil Review

I’ve stumbled over a lot of interesting and fun books by coincidence in my life — sometimes I’ve even found much-beloved authors that way. With this book, though, it was even more strange than normally.
I was actually looking for Aurelio Voltaire on Amazon, but not for him as an author. I was looking for his newest album, “The Black Labyrinth”. Instead, the first hit for the name was a novel, “Call of the Jersey Devil”. It had a pleasantly pulpish cover and so I looked into it and put it on my wish-list. The next day, I decided to buy it, as the e-book wasn’t expensive and I had time to waste, and I could barely put it down to do my duties during the day.

“Call of the Jersey Devil” first got me interested by the wordcraft I experienced from the very first page of the ‘look inside’ feature.
It is only to be expected, I guess, that a singer and songwriter like Voltaire would have the necessary skills to write an engaging scene, yet the wording he used was evocative and powerful and also very, very pulpish. It is also to be expected that someone who delves into the dark side of things in his songs can also write good dark scenes in prose. As I love pulp, the writing was right down my alley. Even though the story starts with a scene set in the past, this scene is also definitely setting the stage, presenting a visceral fight between good and evil, monsters and murder, and a suggestion for what the future might hold.

“Call of the Jersey Devil” is a horror novel and I am sometimes weary of those, as they often include body horror and I’m not generally a body-horror type — I usually prefer psychological horror.
In addition, I do like a balance between darker and lighter scenes, which not all horror stories offer. To me, it’s important to be able to unwind at a few points so I can be properly tense and scared again afterwards. “Call of the Jersey Devil” definitely delivers on this. There are dark and horrid scenes, there’s body horror, and the writing is visceral and very evocative throughout, yet there are also scenes of dark humour which help me relax and get ready for the horrors that await me, so I can properly experience them.
Those scenes also all offer much-needed windows into the souls and pasts of the characters, giving me more reasons to care for them.

Given the pulpish tone of the story, I was also surprised at how well-rounded the characters became over the course of the book.
They started out a little stereotypical, but they gained depth and individuality over the course of the story. Of course, most of them did not survive to the end (although in one case, ‘survive’ is debatable), but that is a given in a horror story. Yet, I cared for them, which made their eventual demise by ghouls, the Jersey Devil, or other forces all the more engaging. It’s easy to see a whole crowd of nameless, faceless stereotypes die and another to see people whose lives’ woes you know go down and be changed into something horrid (or land the worst gig in eternity).
I also love how some horror-story stereotypes were reverted in the book, especially who is allowed to see the end.

The novel does have quite some body horror, from decapitation right up to slowly turning into a ghoul, but it does its job well. I am a little suspicious of body horror most of the time, as most of it only seems to be there for the mere gore factor and not really to drive the story, yet here it is used fittingly.
A character who is defining herself by her beauty (because that is what she learned from her own mother) slowly finding her perfect skin being tarnished with boils and other blemishes, her body bloating from the quick decomposition, her beautiful hair falling out, her face becoming hideous, that is horror. Even though I myself am not defining myself through beauty, I can understand what it would be like to see that shift happening in minutes, turning into a monster, losing your identity and your past, becoming nothing but a blind, ever-hungry creature of Hell.
The book’s excellent wordcraft only enhances this and similar scenes by the visceral and evocative words used — putting pictures in my head which only enhanced the horror of what was happening. It takes a lot of talent to do this and Voltaire pulled it off in his first-ever novel. He has, of course, done it in many songs beforehand, so perhaps I shouldn’t be that surprised.

The pacing of the novel is excellent as well. There are twists and turns in all the right places, the comic-relief moments are frequent, but short, and only make the next rise in tension all the more palpable.
That is the main reason why I couldn’t put “Call of the Jersey Devil” down. The pacing gave me the moments of rest and relaxation when I needed them and then got me engaged in the story again by showing me the next horror, the next monster, the next problem and how the characters reacted to it — sometimes wisely, sometimes less so.
Together with the excellent wordcraft and the well-rounded characters, it was neigh-impossible to put the book down and I finished it within a day. While that is not unheard of for me, it’s been a while since a book engaged me that much and made me want to pick it up or go on reading while there was other stuff that really, really needed doing.

If you like horror stories and pulp, “Call of the Jersey Devil” by Aurelio Voltaire should definitely be on your ‘to read’ list. It’s well-written, has interesting characters that grow on you, paces itself very well, and also gives you a little window in the past of the author himself (since nobody can tell me that has-been Gothic singer Villy Bats has nothing to do with him, even though I wouldn’t call Voltaire a ‘has-been’). Give the story a chance if you can stand more visceral horror stories, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.