The novel “Daimones” by Massimo Marino was published for the first time in 2012. It’s the first volume of the Daimones trilogy.
Dan Amenta understands that it’s one of those days when he arrives to his work place and is immediately called to a meeting where various problems emerge and the result is him being fired. Because of the free time that he suddenly has, he pays some attention to the latest news, among which there are animal mass deaths. When he goes to take his daughter Annah to school, they comes across what at first glance looks like a car crash that involved several vehicles but there’s much more.
Very soon, Dan realizes that all people on the road are dead, even if it’s not the consequence of what looked like an accident. A check of the area shows that only he, his wife Mary and their daughter seem to be still alive. Their attempts to reach someone by telephone and via the Internet are vain. Dan and his family don’t know what may have killed almost everyone in the world and keep on trying to contact other survivors. At the same time they must try to survive in a completely new situation.
“Daimones” begins as a typical apocalyptic novel where something kills most human beings leaving only a few survivors. In this case, initially the protagonist Dan Amenta, who tells the story in the first person, and his family seem to be the only ones still alive showing that the catastrophe was really devastating.
In the first part of “Daimones” there are elements that can be considered standard for this kind of novel with Dan and his family who are trying to gear up to face the new situation. This is inevitable because in the case of an apocalypse, survivors must necessarily do things like getting food and see if there’s still someone else alive.
In addition to the short-term problems to be solved, during the novel the protagonists must deal with other long-term ones. Dan and Mary have a daughter who is 12 years old at the time of the apocalypse, what future can she have? The complete disappearance of society has various consequences and some are unexpected. For the survivors adapting is essential.
Massimo Marino is in my opinion good at maintaining a good level of tension during the novel so even some parts overall obvious are not boring. Initially, the protagonists don’t know the cause of humanity’s near extinction and when Dan explores the area between France and Switzerland around his house he doesn’t know what to expect.
The result is a sense of paranoia for Dan, who gets some weapons to defend himself and his family. He doesn’t know how much they’ll be useful because he doesn’t know what struck humanity nor why he and his family are still alive so he doesn’t know what can hit them. He hopes he can defend them from any other human survivors who might have bad intentions but in the course of his explorations he’s very cautious.
The novel deals with one of the possible problems that would follow an apocalypse: how long would the various utilities work, including the Internet? The stories of this genre have always existed but it’s today in our society that we take for granted services such as running water, electricity and even the Internet.
In “Daimones”, Dan Amenta tries to use Facebook to contact other possible survivors who live in other parts of the world. It’s an updated version of the message in a bottle thrown into the ocean. It seems to me an interesting idea but of course I hope it will never be useful to me. 😉
In many apocalyptic stories the cause of the mass death is known from the beginning but is just an excuse to describe the survivors reactions. From this point of view, “Daimones” is almost the opposite in the sense that at the beginning the cause of the apocalypse is unknown but the protagonists discover it in the final part and this is crucial in the story. This is another element that makes the novel better than the average apocalyptic story.
“Daimones” is a rather short novel by today’s standards so the pace of the story is always quite fast. The protagonists are very few so Massimo Marino can develop them all even if the narrative is in first person so Dan is the most developed one.
Massimo Marino received various awards for independent writers and I think he deserved them because “Daimones” successfully exploited a very classic theme such as the apocalyptic story in a far from trivial way. At the end of the novel the perspective for the survivors completely changes going far beyond the basic theme. The novel has its end which lays the foundation for the squel. I recommend reading it and not only to fans of apocalyptic stories.
