Demons by J.M. Dillard: Should Star Trek fans read it for Halloween?

Demons by J.M. Dillard is a vintage Star Trek horror novel.

When I was younger, I steered clear of horror movies and horror novels as much as I could. I greatly preferred the bright, utopian future I found in Star Trek.

So when I first read Demons by J.M. Dillard (pen name of Jeanne Kalogridis)—her second Star Trek novel, published by Pocket Books in 1986, the same year as her first Star Trek novel, Mindshadow—my teenage Star Trek fan sensibilities were shocked.

My best friend at the time, who was a fellow Trek fan, and I agreed: This was a scary book! This was spine-chilling, skin-crawling, blood-curdling Star Trek horror!

Re-reading Demons nearly 40 years later, I no longer find it the hair-rasing experience I did as a teenage Trek fan. Compared with some horror I’ve read or seen in the decades since, it’s quite tame. Even so, Demons by J.M. Dillard remains a good Star Trek novel to read as we hurtle down the spooky season’s home stretch toward Halloween.

Demons by J.M. Dillard brings “Exorcist” and “Body Snatchers” to Star Trek

When Vulcan archaeologists disturb an ancient alien power on a distant world, they unleash a terrifying evil that threatens not only Spock’s home world but also the Federation and the entire galaxy. The legion of invisible entities, ever only seen directly as an eerie violet glow, take possession of people to do their will.

These possessions lead to insanity and murder. An Enterprise security officer (because, as we know around here, redshirts always die) and Spock’s uncle Silek (a heretofore unknown but sympathetic character) end up among the victims before our heroes manage to exorcize the evil from Vulcan and the Enterprise.

Demons hits several of the same beats as The Exorcist, the book and movie that set the template for tales of demonic possession. Indeed, in one scene, Captain Kirk, under the alien entities’ influence, spins his head around at an impossible angle a la Linda Blair. The “exorcism” required to resolve the possessions in Demons isn’t nearly as dramatic as priests shouting “The power of Christ compels you!,” but is more fitting for the Star Trek universe.

In Jeff Ayers’ Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion (Pocket Books, 2006), J.M. Dillard credits a different horror classic as an inspiration:

"I was teaching an evening class at the university, and had to stay late for some reason. It was an older building, somewhat gothic and spooky, and near Halloween. As I was sitting grading papers, this image popped into my mind of Spock staring at Sarek and saying, ‘That is not my father,’ in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers sort of way (page 64)."

It’s a fascinating connection, given the fact that Leonard Nimoy starred in the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Demons does contain several moments in which readers can’t be sure some of the most familiar and beloved faces in Star Trek are actually who they appear to be. Such moments were my first experience of how unsettling the horror genre could be, and the creepy-crawly sensation I felt when I first read them years ago has stuck with me, even if I no longer find them scary.

In Demons, J.M. Dillard also casts as co-protagonist a rather obvious “Mary Sue” character, one Dr. Anitra Lanter, who is incredibly beautiful and intelligent—attributes remarked upon as often as possible. She possesses engineering skill equal to Mr. Scott and psychic abilities that match or even surpass those of Spock. She also sparks a mercifully brief romantic rivalry between Spock and McCoy. Pocket Books eventually forbade such characters in its Star Trek novels, but Demons hails from the book line’s earlier days. As such, it’s an interesting artifact from an era of Star Trek novels gone by.

Anitra Lanter is the subject of Boris Vallejo’s stunning artwork for the cover of Demons. Holding the oyster-like receptacle that houses these “demons,” Lanter gazes imperiously at the reader with the exact quality of feline beauty the text attributes to her, flanked by McCoy and Spock looking snappy in their “monster maroon” movie-era Starfleet uniforms.

Demons by J.M. Dillard isn’t the shriek-filled Star Trek horror classic I thought it was when I was a teen. But it’s an interesting, fast-paced, entertaining Star Trek adventure, and its often eerie atmosphere makes it a nifty treat for Star Trek fans’ Halloween season reading lists.