The Devil Aspect: A Novel

by Craig Russell

"A blood-pumping, nerve-shredding thriller--elegant, edgy, ingenious. Craig Russell conjures not one but two unforgettable settings: Prague between the wars, pulsing with menace, and a Gothic mental asylum, as exciting a house of horrors as I've ever visited. You'll enter both with dread. You'll dwell in them with relish."
--A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

Prague, 1935: Viktor Kosárek, a psychiatrist newly trained by Carl Jung, arrives at the infamous Hrad Orlu Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The state-of-the-art facility is located in a medieval mountaintop castle outside of Prague, though the site is infamous for concealing dark secrets going back many generations. The asylum houses the country's six most treacherous killers--known to the staff as The Woodcutter, The Clown, The Glass Collector, The Vegetarian, The Sciomancer, and The Demon--and Viktor hopes to use a new medical technique to prove that these patients share a common archetype of evil, a phenomenon known as The Devil Aspect. As he begins to learn the stunning secrets of these patients, five men and one woman, Viktor must face the disturbing possibility that these six may share another dark truth.
     Meanwhile, in Prague, fear grips the city as a phantom serial killer emerges in the dark alleys. Police investigator Lukas Smolak, desperate to locate the culprit (dubbed Leather Apron in the newspapers), realizes that the killer is imitating the most notorious serial killer from a century earlier--London's Jack the Ripper. Smolak turns to the doctors at Hrad Orlu for their expertise with the psychotic criminal mind, though he worries that Leather Apron might have some connection to the six inmates in the asylum.
     Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this stylishly written, tightly coiled, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down.

• ISBN10: 0385544367
• ISBN13: 9780385544368
• Publish Date: 5 March 2019
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 18 September 2020
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Doubleday Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 432
• Language: English

Reviews

[pamela]

The Devil Aspect by Craig Russel was a gripping read, rich with historical research, well-developed characters, and a believable setting. It’s a mix of crime thriller and gothic horror, and treads the line masterfully, leaving the more ‘supernatural’ elements of the story ambiguous. This should have been a five-star read. Craig Russel is a spectacular writer. His pacing is perfect, and his description and worldbuilding absolutely sublime. What brought the book down for me though was that the plot twist was made evident in the very first chapter. When the book reached its climax, I knew exactly where it was going, and this flattened the reading experience somewhat for me.

The Devil Aspect is intelligently written and delves into some of the deeper concepts of human psychology and the nature of God and the Devil. It tackles Jungian concepts, intertwining it with Slavic folklore, and the political history of Czechoslovakia. It was a big task, but Russel rises to it masterfully. He creates deep characters, all with inner turmoil and unique motivations. He realistically writes about character reactions to the political crisis with the rise of Nazism, showing how different people would have viewed the politics of the day with varying degrees of acceptance, fear, and dismissal.

One of Russel’s more masterful strokes is that he subtly compares the thoughts and motivations of his protagonists with the actions of ‘The Devil’s Six’- the six criminals housed in the Hrad Orlu Asylum where young psychiatrist, Victor Kosarek is allowed to test his new methods in order to find the darkness within the prisoners that he terms ‘The Devil Aspect’. While a Jack the Ripper style murderer terrorises Prague with no obvious motivation, the reader hears the stories of The Devil’s Six, whose crimes are given a more human side, really making us question the nature of Evil.

When science can’t yet explain a phenomenon rationally, superstition explains it irrationally. That doesn’t make the phenomenon any less real.

The pacing of The Devil Aspect comes on you like a creeping dread. As the novel went on, I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable, worrying for the characters and their futures. I felt pity for The Devil’s Six, and frustration at the rampant nationalism in the background for which we all know the inevitable consequence. There was a real sense of mystery underlying the narrative, and I was utterly engrossed.

There is no such thing as the supernatural. You know that, I know that, anyone with any intelligence knows that. All there is, is all there is – but you know we’re a long way from understanding it all.

Perhaps that’s why I found the last few chapters a little disappointing. There had been such a sense of mystery the whole way through, but as the The Devil Aspect reached its climax, I realised I knew exactly how things would unfold, and how the inevitable plot twist would play out. The subtle dread that permeated the novel gave way to an action sequence that was a little on the nose and didn’t feel entirely believable within the carefully constructed pacing of the novel.

While the ending was a little disappointing though, the rest of The Devil Aspect more than made up for it. It’s definitely a book that I would recommend, and I’m looking forward to reading more of Craig Russel’s work!