Call Him Demon

Call Him Demon by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore

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Kuttner and Moore, husband and wife, were a gifted writing team, turning out numerous classic short stories during the 1940s and 1950s. Kuttner died tragically young, and Moore, who may have been the more gifted writer of the pair, stopped writing.

This story features the traits that made their writing so powerful. The story opens with Jane visiting her grandmother's home and reckoning a time she spent as a six-year-old with her relatives. For unexplained reasons, an alien presence has inserted itself into the home as a “fake uncle.” The parents are oblivious to this imposition, but the children know. They've been feeding the other half of the entity in some odd parallel reality. When they stop feeding the entity, things turn tragic.

Kuttner and Moore were acolytes of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, they met through their Lovecraft connection. This book reflects the “cosmic horror” themes of Lovecraft, the innocence of the world jammed up to an evil that endures through time.

In some ways, the story is impenetrable in terms of logic, but that is part of the point of the story. The logic in the story is explicitly the logic of children.