Word: demonized
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...Demon on the Tail. In the long-ago (to airmen) days of October 1947, the air was like a prison with invisible steel-strong walls. There seemed to be an upper limit to speed. As airplanes flew faster & faster, strange things had happened to them. Hard, unseen fists punctured their metal skins. Mysterious arms reached out of the air to wrestle with their controls. Sometimes a wartime fighter pilot, diving too fast in combat, would feel his stick freeze fast. No matter how he tried, he could not pull out of the dive. Sometimes he did not live to tell...
Like most Methodist ministers at the turn of the century, Virginia's young (36) James Cannon Jr. was dedicated to the defeat of the Demon Rum. Gaunt and black-bearded, humorless and generally disliked, he licked alcohol by legislation in his native state (1914), did as much as any man to bring prohibition to the U.S. Like many of his contemporaries who believed that morality could be legislated, he periodically struck out at lesser demons. Dancing, tobacco, Coca-Cola and even football ("neither manly nor Christian") felt his indignant lash. But in 1930, this paragon of virtue, by then...
Cannon died a poor man in 1944, all but forgotten by a new generation which was facing fiercer foes of the moral order than Demon Rum. But only 15 years before, Maryland's Senator William Cabell Bruce had risen on the Senate floor to speak the indignation that many another angry church member must have felt: 'God forbid that any clergyman of this kind should ever come near me for the purpose of exercising any office that appertains to his profession. If he were to sprinkle baptismal water upon the head of a child, I should expect...
Lily Sammile is Lilith, the female demon of Jewish folklore, the first wife of Adam, who wanders the world caressing men with her gritty hand, kissing them with her dusty mouth, luring them to the forgotten cemetery shed, which is the Gatehouse of Hell...
...stopped, leaving the lower fourth of the portrait unpainted. Even unfinished, it was a work exploding with energy. Out of the dark haft of the body the bony head leaped like a candle flame; the face, green-eyed and red-lipped, glared with the fury of a fire-demon; and around it burned a halo of white heat, darkening outward to citron and orange. By dawn Van Gogh had lost interest in finishing his work. Next day he traded his Study by Candlelight, still wet, for five Japanese prints. The dealer, perhaps worried about getting his money's worth...