I wasn't flush with cash at Phoenix Fan Fusion this year, so I wasn't able to buy as many books from Artist's Alley as I tend to do or as I'd have liked to do. I've enjoyed what I picked up thus far, and I've reviewed a couple of other Fan Fusion purchases already—'The Terror of Trout Canyon' and 'Valley of the Spun'—but, if I slipped up in my choices, it's surely that I didn't pick up more of John Wayne Comunale's books. He's a real character, in town from Houston, Texas, and I settled for this one, as he recommended.

It's a short read, very possibly a novella rather than a short novel, but it sets its scene quickly and gets on with it without any intention of messing around. What follows is so deliciously wrong that it simply has to count as black comedy, but it presents itself as the time-honoured tale of one man making a bargain with a dark force. Baz isn't a demon and he isn't from Hell—he calls himself "an embodiment of evil"—but a demon from Hell is what he reminds us of and their traditional logic is the structure that Comunale is working with here. Well, kind of.

I don't believe we ever learn the name of our protagonist, because this is told in the first person. It actually makes sense because he's a lazy avatar for our modern culture of instant gratification, so probably can't be bothered to tell us anyway. Everything he does is half-assed because he has little dedication or application, just wants. So, when the clerk at a magic store in the mall tells him that he can get whatever he wants through devil magic, he leaps at the opportunity. After all, he has the hots for Elizabeth but can't be bothered to do anything about it, least of all fight for a promotion so he'll have enough funds to take her out, on the slim chance she might be interested.

I absolutely adored this approach. I grew up with Dennis Wheatley, so the people who did this sort of thing tended to be rich and established, possibly because they've benefitted from deals with the devil already, and they're dedicated and detail-minded to do everything exactly by the book. Which is old-fashioned. How it would happen today is exactly how our unnamed narrator goes about it. He doesn't even buy one of the books recommended to him in the store. He goes home and looks it up on the internet, picks up the cheapest analogues to what's needed and half-asses his way through the ceremony. His approach is summed up like this:

"The pages suggested I get candles made and blessed by a high-ranking witch from my local coven, but I didn't have time for that whole headache, so I just got them from Bed Bath & Beyond. A candle was a candle so I figured they'd do the trick and, besides, they were on sale."

Hilariously, it works. He conjures up Baz—for Bazel—a short and squat little demonic figure with a pair of tiny wings, a deep habit of chainsmoking and a fondness for crappy television. Baz explains the logic. The bigger the sacrifice, the bigger the wish he'll grant, so he'd better start doing better than the couple of pints of blood from the butcher's if he wants results. And so that's how the idiot we're following starts pushing people under buses.

If he wants the promotion, he'd better kill Jim, his only competitor for the position. So he does and hey, there's HR on the phone. If he wants Elizabeth, he'd better kill Jack, her husband. Oh yeah, he had no clue Jack even exists, because he knows nothing about his dream woman beyond how much he wants to get her into the sack, and that's very telling. In fact, after that sacrifice and Elizabeth starts ringing him from the funeral to send him upskirt photos, he still doesn't get to actually know her and, quite frankly, neither do we. She's a prop, a thing he wants, just like the promotion and a growing amount of other things.

This is already a highly original take on the old Faustian bargain story, but Comunale has a further twist coming. While Baz absolutely delivers the goods, he points out that they aren't going to last, unless the deaths keep on coming. In fact, he draws up a list, like the daily chore chart for the kids. You mow the lawn, you do the dishes, you throw someone under a bus. And so, our numbnut lead is trapped in what amounts to a pretty substantial murder spree and Baz gets to stay in our world to do his bidding.

There's a lot more going on here than just that, because we have a whole other universe to spend time in, with other characters from where Baz came from doing things that make little sense to us until everything clicks together and we realise where this game actually began and why. And, for a story that's so gleefully silly on occasion and so deliberately flippant, there's a surprising amount of depth to be found in it. There are moral lessons here, for Pete's sake, and not just what we see right off the bat in the first couple of short chapters.

And there's so much that jabs at the traditions of this tidy little subgenre. Folks have been selling their souls for centuries, enough of them that entire legends have built up around them. We know that it never works out, because the Devil's a sneaky bugger, but folks keep on doing it anyway. It's a given that wishes never turn out precisely how we want them to either, but folks keep on wishing and hoping blindly for the best. What I love most about this book is that Comunale adheres to the traditions but drags them kicking and screaming into the modern day and applies a contemporary twist to them all for the me, me, me generation.

And that makes this 'Doctor Faustus' with the snark of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and the mindset of 'Slacker', the black comedy of 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' but the irreverent silliness of 'Monty Python', wrapped up with a sudden and clever twist that M. Night Shyamalan might well be proud of. It's quite the accomplishment to cram all that into a hundred and thirty pages, but then it could be that John Wayne Comunale pushed someone under a bus this morning. ~~ Hal C F Astell