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Devil's Point #2
The Devil and Dan Cooley
247 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 1996
2 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
Holly Lisle
108 books449 followersHolly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won her the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She has just published WARPAINT, the second stand-alone novel in her Cadence Drake series.
Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:
“So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived.
“My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.
“It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint. From the size of it, it’s a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.”
“Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.
” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’
“The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.
“We were not eaten by a bear that night…but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I’ll ever forget.
“I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I’m putting on paper isn’t at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn’t make my cut.”
You can find Holly on her personal site:
Hollylisle.com
You can find Cadence Drake, Holly's currently in-progress series, on her site:
CadenceDrake.com
You can find Holly's books, courses, writing workshops, and so on here:
The HowToThinkSideways.com Shop, as well as on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in a number of bookstores in the US and around the world.
Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:
“So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived.
“My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.
“It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint. From the size of it, it’s a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.”
“Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.
” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’
“The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.
“We were not eaten by a bear that night…but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I’ll ever forget.
“I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I’m putting on paper isn’t at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn’t make my cut.”
You can find Holly on her personal site:
Hollylisle.com
You can find Cadence Drake, Holly's currently in-progress series, on her site:
CadenceDrake.com
You can find Holly's books, courses, writing workshops, and so on here:
The HowToThinkSideways.com Shop, as well as on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in a number of bookstores in the US and around the world.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 28, 2015
I’d had mixed feelings about the previous book in this series, Sympathy for the Devil. It was well-written and funny, but much more romance-y than I normally like to read. As a quick re-cap, the main premise of this series is that God has authorized a certain number of demons to roam free in North Carolina, interacting with the humans there with various stipulations. If the demons repent they will be permitted to go to Heaven, but naturally they’re more interested in using the opportunity to win more souls for Hell.
This book tells a completely separate story from the first book, with the same setting but with different characters. North Carolina is going downhill because the humans are either moving out of the state or, because nobody wants to buy their property, they’re stuck in North Carolina and struggling financially. A few humans are trying to turn things around by putting effort into reforming the demons. The story begins when a radio DJ encounters a demon fleeing from a mob of humans, rescues it before he realizes it’s a demon, and then decides to try to help it reform. He uses his influence as a DJ to try to get other people involved.
Like the first book, I had mixed feelings about this book. Those mixed feelings were for different reasons, though. This book was nowhere near as romance-y, so I felt like there was more meat to the plot. However, throughout most of the book the story seemed pretty straight-forward and I was a little annoyed about things that seemed unrealistic to me. (Unrealistic within the context of the unrealistic premise, of course!) Toward the end there was a twist that made things fit my expectations much better. So the book was interesting in the beginning when the story was being set up, then it was annoying in the middle when it seemed unrealistic, and then it became more interesting again toward the end. I thought the ending wrapped things up a little too quickly and neatly but, like the previous book, it was a complete story that didn’t leave any cliff hangers.
The books in this series are all pretty short at around 240 pages apiece, and there’s only one more book in this series so I’m going to go ahead and read it.
This book tells a completely separate story from the first book, with the same setting but with different characters. North Carolina is going downhill because the humans are either moving out of the state or, because nobody wants to buy their property, they’re stuck in North Carolina and struggling financially. A few humans are trying to turn things around by putting effort into reforming the demons. The story begins when a radio DJ encounters a demon fleeing from a mob of humans, rescues it before he realizes it’s a demon, and then decides to try to help it reform. He uses his influence as a DJ to try to get other people involved.
Like the first book, I had mixed feelings about this book. Those mixed feelings were for different reasons, though. This book was nowhere near as romance-y, so I felt like there was more meat to the plot. However, throughout most of the book the story seemed pretty straight-forward and I was a little annoyed about things that seemed unrealistic to me. (Unrealistic within the context of the unrealistic premise, of course!) Toward the end there was a twist that made things fit my expectations much better. So the book was interesting in the beginning when the story was being set up, then it was annoying in the middle when it seemed unrealistic, and then it became more interesting again toward the end. I thought the ending wrapped things up a little too quickly and neatly but, like the previous book, it was a complete story that didn’t leave any cliff hangers.
The books in this series are all pretty short at around 240 pages apiece, and there’s only one more book in this series so I’m going to go ahead and read it.
April 5, 2023
This is a fun book with a serious undertone that deals with morality and how the choices that people make affect their future. I like that it gives personalities to God and Devil and has specific "rules" that guides there power they both have over humans. In the book humans lives are guided by the choices that they make and that is the underlying theme in the novel, some things that happen people have no control over and some things are as a result of conscious choices that are made. I like the dark humor and plot twists added to the story. A different kind of book with lots of laughs.
July 11, 2013
I read the first book in the series and loved it. This pales by comparison although the jokes I got were funnier than in the first one. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book. It's just not as good as the first installment in the series.
What I loved:
I loved the imp. The characters were easy to relate to, and there were so truly outstanding ideas regarding human life and free will.
What I didn't like:
The ending. 1. it was too short, as if the authors had run out of ideas and 2. my favorite character was the only one who truly suffered and I hated that.
Still, since I read book one and loved it, and still enjoyed this one, I'll read the next book in the series, hoping it'll be somewhere between one and two on my scale of liking.
What I loved:
I loved the imp. The characters were easy to relate to, and there were so truly outstanding ideas regarding human life and free will.
What I didn't like:
The ending. 1. it was too short, as if the authors had run out of ideas and 2. my favorite character was the only one who truly suffered and I hated that.
Still, since I read book one and loved it, and still enjoyed this one, I'll read the next book in the series, hoping it'll be somewhere between one and two on my scale of liking.
January 19, 2014
So book two is even more blurring of lines between evil and good. There were some provoking concepts which did make me go hmmmm. I remember them even now because I called up my then lover and discussed it with him. He being the strong Christian immediately advised against reading this book and to discontinue reading this author. I enjoy books which cause a good discussion and debate.
January 18, 2009
Aww... I didn't want it to end the way it did, but it was still a great book.
March 1, 2009
Really deserves a 3 1/2, maybe even a 4. But it was not as good as the first one, which was sad, so I rated it a bit low.
January 22, 2016
This is a fun quick read. It is second in the series. For fantasy lovers.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews