DEMON SEED by Dean R. Koontz (Bantam 1973)

The year is 1995, two years since beautiful Susan Abramson's divorce, and she's spent the time alone, practically a hermit, in her futuristic mansion. Her environiment is fully computerized, and the primary user interface is a HAL-style virtual personality that talks to her and obeys her spoken commands. Then one night . . . that personality disappears, replaced by another--PROTEUS, the Artificial Intelligence project which has just "escaped" from the mainframe computers of the local university. And we're off and running!

For a summary of what happens next, I can't improve on the back-cover copy:

It was the first mating of a human female with a sensually self-programmed, murderously intelligent . . . COMPUTER. No woman had ever been violated as profanely. Subjected to the inhuman love of Proteus, she became a slave, forced to submit entirely to his will. At first, Proteus shaped her personality to suit his own obsessive desires. Then he began to prepare her for the most perverse destiny of them all. Proteus had chosen her to bear his child . . . DEMON SEED. The stunning novel of a new erotic dimension.

The good news is, the novel is every bit as lurid as that sounds and as the cover art promises. I tip my hat to Koontz for the lengths to which he goes with this idea. The first two-thirds or so dive right into the whole fantasy of erotic mind control (with heavy doses of that most seventies form of mind control--subliminals), and he doesn't shrink from any of the sex, sadism or kinky power-struggles that form the fantasy's core. The resulting pregnancy is as horrific as can be imagined (okay, maybe not, if you consider the "pregnancies" from the Alien series), and the spawn of this ghastly conception makes Rosemary's Baby look like . . . well, a baby.

What makes this novel more compelling than run-of-the-mill horror-sexploitation is the carefully drawn psychological dynamic that glues Proteus and Susan together. I got the sense that, like a vampire, he's entered her dwelling and her life in response to an invitation on her part, however subtle. One of the thorniest problems of human nature that Freud ever considered was the "compulsion to repeat" traumatic events and situations. This phenomenon is most unsettling when "the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality." As Freud notes,

The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences.

The implications for horror fiction are succinctly stated by Steve Rasnic Tem: "I think that in some stories the house is not haunted until we walk into it." Proteus's invasion and haunting of Susan's home, as horrific as it is, seems to serve deep, dark needs in her that the previous bland personality of her computer never did. Even before Proteus arrives, her interaction with her home's automated persona is tinged with incestuous and exhibitionistic desires. She thinks of it as her "father-lover" and walks around nude, imagining it watching her through its multifarious cameras and sensors. In a sense, the house's personality switch from "father-lover" to Proteus takes Susan's fantasy where it was already straining to go.

(By the way, none of this should be confused with a crude "blame the victim/she asked for it and liked it" kind of notion. This unconscious complicity in one's own victimization is nothing like "consent," either legally or morally. Another distinction that must be firmly kept in mind is this: spinning or enjoying a fantasy around it is nothing like condoning it in real life.)

I mentioned good news, so of course there must be bad news. Apparently, this novel has been "updated," and most of the reviews posted at Amazon aren't happy about it. I've already vented my disapproval of such updates when I discussed Glut's Frankenstein series. I'll reiterate it here. Demon Seed is a product of its time--a heady brew that mixes 2001 and Westworld with the Satanic baby craze that swept through every entertainment medium. No amount of fiddling with the technical details could ever change that. And the outdated projection of a very near future should be allowed to stand, anyway, precisely because it is a projection, and therefore a reflection of its own groovy present.

On a final note, if anyone can identify the cover artist, please let me know. Bruce Benner of Vintage Paperbacks had a look and guessed it might be Paul Lehr, but couldn't say for certain. If anyone can confirm that or positively identify another artist, I'd sure appreciate it!