Running from the Devil: A Memoir of a Boy Possessed

This memoir about a "boy possessed" reads like a cross between The Exorcist and David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. Having been born into a Catholic household and eventually becoming an alter boy, Steve Kissing's childhood relationship with the Church was characterized by the usual bouts of reverence and guilt. Then one day, at the age of 11 years old, he suddenly started hallucinating and hearing a garbled voice in his head while sitting in his fifth-grade classroom. He managed to push the incident out of his mind until a few months later when the visions and voice returned during Sunday Mass. At this point, Kissing assumed it was the devil taking over his soul. After all, he was certainly a likely candidate, considering that he had recently shoplifted candy among other moral transgressions. From here the memoir takes on a hilarious and tragic storyline as we follow this poor possessed soul through his teenage years. When the devil possesses Kissing, he conjures up visions that are simultaneously bizarre and familiar—close friends suddenly look like Helen Reddy or Henry Kissinger, or even the Joker from the televisions show Batman.

All along he was afraid to tell anyone about his run-ins with Lucifer—-not even his parents knew. "I worried too that telling someone would only anger Satan and incite more trouble, sort of like telling a teacher that one of the eight graders is harassing you. It only seemed to make the bully all the more eager to catch you alone on the way home from school," he writes. "I was not about to be a Satan snitch." It would take five years of literal living hell (which he manages to describe with just the right amount of humor and heartbreak) before discvoering what in the hell was really going on. This is one of the most entertaining and twisted Catholic coming of age stories ever written. --Gail Hudson