A to Z - D (2014)

I'm doing the A to Z Blogging Challenge this year. The basic idea is to blog nearly daily with each day representing a different letter of the alphabet. My entries will be short and book-related.  

D is for...

Demons!

I love urban fantasy, and I'll probably write an entire post on it later this month so I'm going to steer away from commenting on it as a genre. Demons are an important staple of the genre. While vampires, werewolves and angels tend to get a lot of attention, demons fill a significant catch-all category, much like faeries.

There's so much variety in demons. I'm reading City of Bones by Cassandra Clare right now and it features a demon that's massive, disgusting, very otherworldly with a physical and an ethereal presence. Then I pick up the Hollow series by Kim Harrison (which I really need to catch up on!) and we've got a whole new set of demons. Karen Chance's Cassandra Palmer series has some completely human-esque demons, but they have extra powers. 

I think that unlike the specific categories, demons (and faeries, but today is 'd' :P ) don't have quite so many expectations placed on them as a 'type'. I find that sometimes it's really just used in place of 'monster.' And isn't that interesting, because I think if you through out the word monster, you're distancing readers from your 'creature' - a monster is clearly other... while a humanoid demon who is charming, eloquent, bipedal... that could be you or me!  We can relate!