
Bookforum talks with Jen Percy
In 2005, Special Forces machine gunner Caleb Daniels lost eight members of his unit in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Here, Meehan Crist interviews Jen Percy about her recent book, which describes Caleb's attempts to recover from the trauma via exorcism.
In 2005, seasoned Special Forces machine gunner Caleb Daniels lost eight members of his unit in a Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan. As Jennifer Percy describes in her recent book, Demon Camp, Caleb was haunted afterward by images of friends’ charred bodies. When he left Afghanistan, something he called The Black Thing followed him home. Caleb struggled to adjust to civilian life, certain The Black Thing was trying to kill him. Then he met a minister, who persuaded him the apparition was a Destroyer Demon, just one in a pantheon of demons and angels fighting a war between good and evil.