Barry Maher’s The Great Dick and the Dysfunctional Demon starts with a Harvard professor in the late sixties riffing on Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby and tossing off the idea of a modern version called “The Great Dick.” The story then jumps to 1982 and to Steve Witowski, a thirty-something screwup on the run from a botched drug deal who stumbles into a brutal assault near an old church on the California coast. He tries to help, kills the attacker in chaotic self-defense, and meets Victoria Fairchild, a luminous stranger with secrets of her own. From there, the book slides into a mix of road novel, noir, and supernatural thriller as Steve gets dragged deeper into a tangle of murder, occult relics, demons that may or may not be real, and his own talent for bad decisions.

Steve opens by flat-out calling himself an asshole, and the narration never lets him off the hook. His inner monologue is sharp, petty, funny, horny, scared, sometimes all in the same beat. The writing leans hard into sensory detail and low-level absurdity, like the reek of the Checker cab or the way cheap weed and an old song drift through the scene right before the attack. The fight on the embankment is brutal and weirdly intimate. Keys in his fist, Latin muttered at the worst possible moment, a truck roaring closer. I could feel the panic in my throat. When the book slows down afterward and lets Steve and Victoria talk, that same energy hums under the dialogue. The tone stays casual and foul-mouthed, yet there is a careful rhythm in the sentences. It feels tossed off in the way really worked-over prose often does. I found myself rereading lines just to enjoy how a joke landed or how an image curved at the end.

The book plays with failure and faith in a way that was thought-provoking. Steve keeps trying to patch his life with lies, quick exits, and a little dope, then suddenly he is neck deep in something that smells like capital E Evil. The dagger with the names of Jehovah, Ahura Mazda, Huitzilopochtli, and Asmodeus etched into the handle is such a great symbol for the book’s spiritual chaos. It pulls Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Aztec gods into the same creepy object and then hands it to a loser who just wanted to dodge a prison sentence. I liked how the story keeps asking what counts as sin, what counts as choice, and where simple cowardice shades into something darker. At the same time, it never reads like a lecture. It feels like a wild story that happens to drag big questions in behind it.

The book is full of sex, violence, and black humor, yet there are small, quiet moves that give it an unexpected emotional weight, little flashes of shame or tenderness or sheer exhausted relief. The setting, work around coastal California, and the abandoned church give the more supernatural turns a solid, grimy base to grow out of, which I really liked, and the whole thing runs on a kind of nervous, late-night momentum.

I would recommend The Great Dick and the Dysfunctional Demon to readers who enjoy flawed, talkative narrators, morally messy thrillers, and horror that leans into both jokes and genuine unease. If you like work in the vein of Carl Hiaasen or early Stephen King but wish it had more occult weirdness and a bit more sex, this will probably hit the spot. For anyone up for a fast, foul-mouthed, slightly unhinged ride that still has something on its mind, I think this book is absolutely worth the trip.

Pages: 464 | ASIN : B0FKWK2K7C