THE WAKENING

Fifty years ago, a young exorcist, Father Leo Bonaventura, cast a demon out from a young boy in Central America. The demon, Asmodeus, vowed revenge. Now Asmodeus has returned, in the same town where Bonaventura is a retired priest nearing the end of his life. At the same time, the possession of a young girl brings together an unlikely group of people, all of whom are linked in their pasts in some way: a group of paranormal investigators, including twin psychics. Robert Lockhart, a defrocked priest with a dark secret that only the twins know. A father whose dead wife was a college girlfriend of Robert’s and once conjured an evil spirit with him through a Ouiji board. Now they must all join forces and help Father Bonaventura rid the town not only of Asmodeus, but also the plague of poltergeists that have followed the demon into our world.

This is a story that is very close to my heart, because parts of it are based on actual stories told to me by Rev. Alphonsus Trabold while I attended college at St. Bonaventure University in upstate NY. Father Trabold was, at the time, New York State's official exorcist for the Catholic Church, and he'd carried out or presided over hundreds of exorcisms, in addition to evaluating cases of hauntings or possession for the Church. He even worked with Ed and Lorraine Warren on some of their big cases. By the time I entered college he'd mostly retired from active work, but I got to sit down with him at various cocktail parties and talk to him about the supernatural, which even then I had a huge interest in. A couple of his stories really stuck with me, and they ended up being the basis for this book.

Once I decided to write it, the only thing I needed to do was add in the subplots and create some interesting characters. Like pretty much every horror fan, I have read and seen The Exorcist and many other possession stories, so I wanted to make mine as different as possible while still staying true to not only Fr. Trabold's original tales but also the actual details of what exorcism involves. Which made me think, what would be even more frightening than demonic possession? And the answer hit me while doing some research: sometimes the presence of a demon creates an environment that's conducive to poltergeist activity and ghosts.
Right there, I had my answer.

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