Azazel's Public House

In Arginteanu’s debut novel, supernatural forces run rampant in 1980s New York.

The book opens on a nostalgic note that quickly turns dark: Teenagers Carl and Anthony are wasting time in a Staten Island area called the Dump (“a landfill that you could see from space”) in the pre-internet era: “Nowadays, Staten Island teenagers are glued to smartphones and huddled in cool, dark hideouts, like albino bats,” notes the third-person narration. “Nowadays, if no one's posted it online, it’s not real.” When their play fight becomes suddenly serious, Anthony is gravely wounded when his head hits a rock, and Carl, prompted by an insistent voice in his head, leaves his friend to die.The voice belongs to a supernatural being named Preta, who goes by the name of Pete and “promises the world but delivers only misery.” Pete is a servant of a being who calls himself “the man downstairs,” who’s tied his corporeal form to a dive bar called Azazel’s Public House, where profits are measured “not in dollars and cents but in increments of misery.” Carl wonders if the fact that he’s hearing Pete’s voice means he is going insane, but others hear Pete as well, including a young woman named Gina who, over the course of the novel, displays an aptitude not only for hearing Pete’s evil suggestions, but for resisting them as his elaborate plans escalate to their climax. Arginteanu’s prose throughout is vivid and colorful, and he keeps his narrative bubbling with interest by filling it with a large cast of well-defined characters, from barmaid Holly, who “wore her long blonde hair in braids and carried herself like a mighty Valkyrie,” to Dr. Clancy, who'd “notched countless neurosurgical triumphs and suffered fewer disasters than most.” The author does a remarkably skillful job at mixing casual brutalities of life with the uplifting qualities of existence that stubbornly persist—although, perversely, readers may find themselves rooting for Pete above all.

A grim but thoroughly enjoyable tale set amid urban horrors.