The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren
By: Gerald Brittle / Narrated By: Todd Haberkorn
Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
Walk, no RUN, awaaaay from that Ouija board…!
What would life be without a little bit of good ol’ fear thrown into it?
Okay, how ‘bout a LOT of fear thrown in?!?
So I’ll start this off by getting the narration out of the way: Todd Haberkorn does a decent enough job, but the vocal juggling he does rather hinders this, The Demonologist, from being a terrifying Listen. Things go along, tra lala lala SCARY then we get to someone’s voice, and we’re imMEDiately taken out of it all, just when we’re about ready to jump out of our skins. That he makes Lorraine Warren sound like someone’s old aunt is just laughable, and that’s NOT a good thing as she’s the clairvoyant extraordinaire of this duo and gets plenty of airtime. And okay okay, I’ll add where I got even more chuckles: The writing. Gerald Brittle abuses dialogue tags like crazy. It’s never He said, or She said. It was always He responded, She queried, He quipped, She said scowlingly. It drove me nuts.
But, uhm… that was about all that I found funny, cuz the rest had me creeped out, tho’ I did wind up with some Demon Fatigue by around 8 hours in.
Lemme just give ya some background on who I am and what kind of audience I made for this audiobook: I was raised Catholic, and when I was little we had comic books about Revelations and the Anti Christ. My mom once told me about a dog with red eyes that chased her when she was a little girl but then disappeared. Basically, my childhood had me saying, In the name of Jesus Christ, begone Satan! quite a bit (If it went bump in the night, I was squealing those words for all I was worth). Lapsed tho’ I might be, I still can’t shake the feeling that there are demoniacal entities out there (And it never hurts to pack some Holy Water…).
So when we have this book, and supposedly it’s used as a text book in seminaries and does indeed come off as a sort of guidebook, telling one what to do if one finds one’s self in an “infested” house, well, it sorta made me go weak at the knees every now and again. It’s also a What NOT To Do book in that, if you find dolls moving themselves around, do NOT get your sister’s best friend’s cousin who kinda talks to spirits to come over for a séance, and do NOT give the spirit who yaks to you a name! Also… DUDE, do NOT play with Ouija boards… bad bad bad!!!
The book is many, many of Ed and Lorraine’s cases that occurred in the decade of the 70s, so I s’pose this is rather an ancient book, but hey: A good demon infestation never gets old. My favorite was the one out of control house that occurred because Mom gave daughter a conjuring book for Christmas (Nothing says Ho Ho Ho better than a book on summoning Satan). DUDE, NO to the conjuring books, esPECially if your kid just happens to have black candles and a lot of free time.
The Amityville house is discussed in great depth, and other infestations too. Plus there’s a whole lot of time given to the one room in Ed and Lorraine’s house where they keep objects too “hot” to be taken anywhere else. Ed keeps thinking he hears Lorraine walking down the hall only to look up from his desk to discover a dark mass barreling in at him, a freezing cold spot descending, wild animals fighting upstairs. He wonders why this is so. Oh yeah, and in that room, crosses keep turning upside down. What IS a demonologist to do?
Oh I dunno, how about continue with saving people from demons (Alas, they can’t as Ed died some time ago, and Lorraine died in 2019)? So, like, what? Now we can only rely on The Church for blessings and exorcisms? Egad… in the audiobook, the priests kept getting bogged down by all the documentation they had to have done before they could step in and do anything (And even then, they had to take DAYS for fasting and prayer).
So, scary enough as I kinda sorta felt like I was inviting demons into my life by simply choosing to listen to this (Things have been going bump in the night…), but you’ll have the worst of your jitters tamped down by sometimes humorous narration.
I do have to hand it to narrator Haberkorn, however. He can do In The Name of Jesus Christ!!!! like nobody’s business…!
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