The blurb on the cover of Hunter Shea’s novel, The Jersey Devil, celebrates it as “Old-School Horror.” That, like the title of the book, is dead-on accurate. It’s not normally my genre, and it’s got some serious triggers for graphic violence and sexual assault. And yet, of everything I’ve read or watched so far about New Jersey’s state demon, it comes the closest to fulfilling the potential of the beast.
Shea has done his homework. His Jersey Devil is the real deal, the monstrous offspring of Mother Leeds, with the cloven hooves and the leathery wings and the horselike head with its red, glowing, soulless eyes. It lives deep in the Pine Barrens, which locals call the Pinelands, and up until the present day of the novel, it has not been particularly murderous.
That doesn’t mean it’s not a monster. We learn what it is and what it wants and how it goes about getting it, through the eyes and experiences of a large cast of characters. The Pinelands are a wilderness and a wasteland, but they’re also part of the densely populated state in the United States. There is a lot of coming and going through a landscape that was, up until a century ago, a patchwork of farms and towns and factories.
It’s all in ruins now, but not deserted. Preppers and survivalists and pot growers have formed enclaves deep in the pines. It’s dangerous to wander off the beaten path, even without the legendary cryptid.
The story unfolds from several directions. A woman accidentally kills her abusive husband. A young couple set up a Jersey Devil camping experience. Two more couples are just plain camping. There’s a dive bar with a regular clientele, and a benefit concert put on by a group of teens against bullying. A cryptozoologist follows a lead to the legendary cryptid. And a family with a mysterious past and a deadly agenda comes hunting the monster.
Norm the cryptozoologist joins forces with the Willet family against a newly violent and rampantly deadly version of the Jersey Devil. The Devil always been singular, though the week-long panic of 1909 seems to have been incited by more than one Devil across a wide geographical range. But recent attacks point toward a swarm of the creatures.
Somehow, the Devil has multiplied. And he’s no longer relatively harmless. This new incarnation attacks, shreds, and devours just about anything that moves.
That’s bad, and gets worse, the more of them there are, but that’s not even the full horror of the beast. All those ravenous baby devils have to come from somewhere. This is a devil, a monster, but it’s born of a human woman. It—he—is capable of reproducing. To do so, he abducts women. There is no question of consent.
The Willets are connected to the Jersey Devil through what amounts to a family curse. Their grandfather and his wife, before they were married, went camping in the Pinelands, and had a terrifying encounter that left both of them forever changed. Literally in the case of Lauren, the grandmother: she came home with the mark of a cloven hoof on her side.
Lauren has died, but the mark has passed on to her son and through him to her three grandchildren. They don’t know what it means, or what it does. They do know, as reports of violent deaths come out of the Pinelands, that it’s time to track the mystery to its source.
So here we have the classic clueless-camper horror plot (two ways), the cursed family with the mysterious mark of the devil, the horrific monster-breeding program with captive, severely emotionally damaged women, plus the TV cryptid guy, and for extra special bonus trope points, an illegal toxic waste dump that produces swarms of mutant monsters. It’s a lot, but Shea keeps most of it under control, and brings it all together into a massive, bloody, heart-pounding conclusion.
The center of it, the original Devil, is his legendary self. He’s huge, he’s powerful, and he’s dangerously intelligent. He has absolutely no empathy. His only purpose is to breed offspring and make sure they have the means to feed and grow. Most of the carnage is theirs. They attack, they rend, they devour.
They do not, except accidentally, try to either kill or eat the marked members of the Willet family. The reason for that is just as awful as you might expect. They’re breeding stock. The sister is destined to give birth to further swarms of monsters. The father and her brothers are capable of producing daughters who can do the same.
It’s fascinating to see how locked in the Hollywood Ratio is, even in a novel. One woman, three men. Though, to be fair, the Devil abducted five women for his breeding program, and tries to abduct at least two more. Unlike the full humans, he can be practical about gender ratios.
Because this is old-school horror, there are buckets of blood and gore, a wide range of weapons, an astronomically high body count, and an explosive finale. A Leeds descendant has a cameo, and essential information to share with the hunters. The cryptid guy gets to fulfill every cryptid hunter’s dream—but he finds he’s not as into fame and fortune as he thought he would be. He’s learned a classic lesson: Be Careful What You Wish For.
This Jersey Devil is a lot more than a metaphor. He’s all too real. A mother’s curse gave birth to him, and the curse of toxic waste turned him into a deadly danger. Ultimately he’s the product of human flaws and failures, and he both exacts and pays a terrible price.
