Author: Sawney Hatton
Published by: Dark Park Publishing
The Devil’s Delinquents is a quick and fun read inspired by murders committed by teen “Satanists” during the mid-eighties to the early nineties, a nod to the Satanic Panic lived in the United States. Hatton hits the nail right on the head: the book reads as a satire of all the cautionary tales we heard growing up about how befriending the “wrong type” of people could get you tangled up in disastrous occurrences. That’s what happens when the outcast teens Cal and Derry meet Natalie, a self-proclaimed Satanist who claims to be capable of contacting demons and performing spells to hurt her enemies.
The author does a great job regarding character building, each of the protagonists has distinguishable traits that make it clear why they’re outsiders and why their friendship becomes co-dependent so fast. Natalie is a perfect example of a manipulative and self-centered (teenage) cult leader, who succeeds in roping in the gullible by promising to provide their biggest desire. However, what makes her and the other protagonists believable, is that Hatton shows the reader their home lives, their relationships with their parents, and their weaknesses. When we read about the environment they grew up in, their personalities make perfect sense. We can see why Cal is so insecure and passive, why Derry is impulsive, and why Natalie has so much anger towards the world. By the end of the story, I felt like I understood them and why they did what they did. That made it all seem real, which made me even sadder with the outcome that I knew was inevitable.
The only thing that bothered me was the number of descriptions. I’m not a fan of detailing every single aspect of a character or scenario because it takes me out of the story and it becomes annoying quickly. This was originally a screenplay and I believe that’s the reason so many scenes were (in my opinion) overly detailed. Even so, the book was incredibly well-written, and the descriptions didn’t dampen my reading experience too much. The pace gets faster as the story progresses, becoming frenetic during the third and last part. I loved that the pace matched the mental state the protagonists were in, getting faster as they became more unstable, culminating in a final act that I found so raw and brutal that I had to skim over the gorier acts.
I recommend this to those who, like myself, are interested in stories revolving around cults and/or the Satanic Panic era.
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