Word: demonism
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...deserves to be reckoned with great U. S. fiction, whether it should even be considered a novel at all. Challenging comparison with The Scarlet Letter in its theme, it is obviously pale, frail, overintellectualized beside Hawthorne's masterpiece. Evil for Hawthorne's puritans was intense, powerful, a demon to be fought. For Santayana's characters it is distant, abstract, a moral problem to be solved like geometry. Thus the characters in The Last Puritan are real as symbols of Santayana's philosophy rather than as people...
...paper profits. He shows the boys his predictions for the races and, desperately they lay their last "fin" as he indicates. His horse comes through and so do all his other prognostications for the day. The "boys" adopt Erwin as their oracle and with the aid of Demon Rum keep him in their hotel penning his sweet lines and doping the races. After a hectic few days of this the mild Erwin becomes a man in his own right and, considerably enriched, returns to take his place as wearer of the pants in his own home...
...rowing trunks took shape. The youth's left arm stretched toward the pensive goddess, who turned out to be the Mother of Compassion. His right arm faded into a scene of cruelty and destruction: machine gunners, cannon, the ogre Greed. Most gruesome bit of all was the Demon of Hate, also bisexual, slashing a man's throat...
...more local, and far more disturbing infringement on the moral atmosphere of Copperthwaite Street, is personified in one Charles Breen. Breen, affectionately termed the Proprietor of Parke and Tilford's by his Dunster House acquaintances, partakes freely of intoxicating potations at periodic intervals. Under the influence of demon rum, he invariably gives vent to his superfluous enthusiasm by standing on Copperthwaite Street at six o'clock in the morning, summoning all the vocal power at his command, and calling out random remarks concerning the intelligence, habits, and ancestry of Dunster men in particular, Harvard men more generally, and all college...
...chatter and gesticulate in test-tube prisons in his Mephistophelian laboratory. Pretorius forces the Baron to collaborate on a woman-monster by having the Baron's bride (Valerie Hobson) kidnapped until he consents. There is one scene in which Pretorius and Frankenstein make a heart for their she-demon out of the still warm organ of a young girl murdered by their assistant, and another in which they impregnate her with crackling life from a lightning bolt brought down on gigantic kite-cables. The synthetic woman (Elsa Lanchester) lives to demonstrate complete distaste for the monster intended...