Review - The Devil Aspect by Craig Russell

The Devil Aspect
Craig Russell
Constable, 7 March 2019
HB, 496pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

Czechoslovakia in the mid 1930s, and psychiatrist Dr Victor Kosárek is travelling to take up a new appointment at the Hrad Orlu asylum - where the most dangerous of the criminal insane, the "Devil's Six", each with a nickname (The Clown, The Vegetarian, The Glass Collector and so on) are confined in a medieval castle among the central European forest.  Meanwhile, Kapitán Lukáš Smolák of the Prague City Police patiently, methodically hunts down a serial killer - Leather Apron - who murders and butchers women in Prague.  Against a background of rising political tensions, as the Nazis in Germany stir up trouble among German Czechs and it becomes important to watch what you say and who you say it to, the young doctor struggles to understand the Six, treating them to a revolutionary new "therapy" - bringing them close to death with sedatives in search of their "Devil Aspect", the dark part of their psyche that holds clues to their evil behaviour.

I found this book impressive in many ways. From the opening scene, Russell plays with our expectations, exploiting the reader's familiarity with, or even just knowledge of, horror tropes. Take that opening scene. A doctor named Viktor. A "patient" in restraints. The isolated castle. It's hard not to see this as a reference to Frankenstein, just as, later in the book, the fear and hatred of the villagers for the castle and its inhabitants brings to mind Dracula. There's even a reference at one point to a mob of villagers hunting down what they think is a monster.

But the book also makes other connections - the comparison between that "Devil Aspect" in all of us, and the rising tide of evil and hour soon to swamp Europe, hardly needs to be pointed out. It's felt by Jewish Judith Blochová and expressed in nightmares of her and her family being led out into the forests to be killed. It's there in the attitudes of Nazi-sympathising staff at the asylum, whose proposals for the imprisoned criminals are easy enough to guess. And it's there when Kosárek and his friend Filip Starosta run into trouble one night with a group of Czech Germans.

The whole atmosphere - drawing deeply on Slavic mythology and European history, as well as an impressive deployment of Jungian psychology - is one of subtle menace, even before we are given graphic details the murders in Prague and told (via Kosárek's interviews) of the crimes of the asylum's residents, and before comparisons are made with jack the Ripper. I did begin to find that succession of crimes a little much. With six prisoners in the castle, all of whom have committed multiple murders, it's quite a lot to hear even if, thankfully, we generally get the setup rather than all the details. The Prague murders are fewer but we're told more about the killings and mutilations. On the whole I preferred the parts of the book that deal with the subtler threats - the suspicious villagers, the dancing bars with their political and ethnic tensions, even the distressed man who Kosárek encounters at the station after his friend fails to appear at the start of the book.

I also enjoyed the slyer aspects of the book such as Smolák's deputy who, while perfectly competent, is clearly waiting for him to fail, and in the meantime, trying to scatter a little doubt and suspicion around, or Judita's history, with her thwarted ambition to study medicine. If the book has any message it is, I think, to watch out for seemingly inconsequential things - dreams, coincidences, mistakes - and to join the dots.

So - on the whole a satisfyingly creepy horror/ psychological thriller, especially in the opening part, establishing that stressy atmosphere, and in the final third where the hunt for the killer really gets moving. Overall I think that in the middle part, more could have been made of the political aspects, and there could have been a bit less gore. But well worth reading if you like your horror a little different.

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here.