Devil in Ohio by Daria Polatin (review)

Mae arrives in the hospital beaten, bruised, and branded with a bloody pentagram carved on her back. Suzanne, the hospital psychiatrist, takes her home, and while her fifteen-year-old daughter, Jules, is miffed at being displaced from her bedroom, she also feels sorry for Mae as she learns more of her story. Jules' sympathy is soon strained, however, as Mae's popularity soars at school and she moves in on Jules' crush, and when it becomes clear that Suzanne's obsessive concern for Mae is coming between Jules' formerly happy parents. Since the devil-worshiping cult from which Mae escaped wants her back and since Mae is still vulnerable to their programming, Jules devises a plan to trigger Mae into returning, not realizing that Suzanne will stop at nothing to get Mae to a safe place. While Jules comes across as unlikable at times, especially with her genuinely cruel plan to get rid of Mae, her motives are understandable enough to make her sympathetic, and the lengths she goes to in rescuing Mae earn her redemption. Shifts between Jules' first-person perspective and chapters in third person focalized through Suzanne are disorienting at first, but they fill in needed gaps in the mystery of Mae's situation. The seclusion of the cult makes its practices all the more horrible as they operate outside the normal structures of legal accountability; the police's frustrating refusal to engage and the mild narrative scolding of middle-class privilege play to readers who want to explore questions of heroic good versus supernatural evil in realistic fiction. A titillating ending suggests, however, that Mae's immersion in cults may not be over. KC