Mysterion, February 2024
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
There’s a lot to like about “Deymons” by Andy Dibble, the February offering of Mysterion. For one thing, the near-future world of the story, where most people live on-line in order to reduce their carbon footprint, is quite credible. Sadly, I agree with the author that reading will become an almost forgotten skill, and that our communal attention span will continue to shrink until “no one tolerates being anywhere for more than about forty seconds.” I was also impressed by Dibble’s depiction of playing—living—the titular shared-world game Deymons, in which participants travel a perilous dark Path from fire to fire—an inspired metaphor—while overcoming evil things. Although this reviewer is neither a Christian nor a religious man, I also appreciated the heart of the story, which addresses the human desire to believe, and asks if it is even possible for a modern person to experience faith and religion in the same way as our ancestors did. Unfortunately, perhaps in an effort to make concrete the reality of this world, Dibble tortures their prose with inconsistently idiosyncratic spelling—”view” becomes “vieuw”; “feed” becomes “feyd”; and “demons” is, of course, “deymons.” Sure, the author justifies this irritating practice by asserting that spelling will change “under pressure to optimize content for search engines,” but these are not phonetic spellings—I checked. Worse, from this reviewer’s perspective, the ending of the story is intentionally anti-climactic, and while I can understand the philosophical point being made by this narrative choice, as a reader, I was really looking forward to a final battle between Mylo and Cynthia and the dreadful deymon Queyn… Might appeal to Kierkegaard fans.