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Book: Seven Demon Worse by Ewen Harris |
Seven Demons Worse by Ewen Harris demonstrates American family values in serious crisis, and moral values in decay. A very powerful and compelling book about the moral conscience of society. Harris is not afraid to lash out at the destructive consequences to society of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. He remains in defiance of immorality.-- OUTCRY Magazine |
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When Ewen Harris completed a doctoral program in 1984, he vowed to write down much of what he had seen, heard, and endured during years of graduate school. The general public, he realized, is wholly unaware of what an embittered and nihilistic setting a graduate campus is, especially in a Humanities program (where, ironically, human beings are most insistently broken up into races and genders at war with one another eternally). He was especially appalled by the tyrannical reign of sexual promiscuity among our culture’s best and brightest. Not only were one-night stands and partner-swapping tolerated, he had discovered—they were virtually required for participation in the academic community’s social life. Any rare visitor to this privileged world who practiced abstinence and believed in marriage was a representative of the hateful bourgeois religious patriarchy. Such a person was not to be spoken to, and (as he knew from experience) could be lied to and snubbed without any morally "bad vibes."
A lot has happened in the last fifteen years, but much of it is merely a postscript to the early eighties. Indeed, that decade itself was a natural consequence of trends begun in the seventies and late sixties: the glorification of sexual promiscuity as a means of liberating women, the surrender of the campus to counter-cultural forces, and the commitment to materialist explanations of man’s being and destiny. Now prominent feminists are more likely to advertise lesbian relationships, the counter-culture has so thoroughly sabotaged the university that liberal arts programs lie in shambles, and hostility to religion has worked such ravages that spiritual young people fall easy prey to cults and slick pulpit-entrepreneurs. To track this sad degeneration to Hollywood or Washington or Littleton would not be at all difficult, and a few daring new novels will no doubt do it using familiar names from the headlines. Harris, however, clung to his idea of writing about the experiences he had seen up close. He changed or concealed names, shuffled places, and edged the time forward slightly to 1990, but his story remained essentially the one whose seeds had been sown years before in Austin, Texas.
Seven Demons Worse is this story. It belongs no more to 1984, a year whose Orwellian undertones once haunted our nation’s guilty conscience, than to that apocalyptic year 2000 which already has many people preparing their bunkers. It is a chronicle about ruined humanity degraded by a loveless sex-for-sex hedonism and of an educational elite which betrayed its sacred trust; but it is also a parable of genuine redemption—a tale about facing failure, feeling honest shame, and walking a new path of love whose destination rests beyond the things of this world. E-mail the author: alasdair@lakecountry.net
