Publishers Weekly
11/11/2013
Tropes surrounding veterans in the public discourse—invincible warriors, heroic patriots—mask the reality of warfare, but Percy peels back the gauze, revealing deeply wounded individuals. Having enlisted to escape hometown oppression or untenably low positions on the socioeconomic ladder, veterans return haunted by the violence they’ve endured. Caleb, Percy’s primary subject, is besieged by apparitions after his closest friend dies in a helicopter crash, and comes to rely on his hallucinations to get him through the day. An army psychologist explains that sufferers of PTSD will relive their trauma “again and again until the mind is able to assimilate and process the event,” experiencing a world of demons more real than physical objects. Caleb and other veterans are drawn to tiny Portal, Ga., where a self-taught pastor engages in “spiritual warfare,” claiming he stopped counting the number of exorcisms he’s performed after 5,000. Percy becomes part of the life of the church, where the veterans and the true believers maintain a measure of distance, treating each other with a mutual wariness. Her sharp, unadorned writing captures the rawness of the congregants’ lives, the permeability of the borderline between reality and imagination —her own exorcism proving to her “how easily, how intrusively, a heightened situation can make us, any of us, slip.” (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"[Percy's] sharp, unadorned writing captures the rawness of the congregants' lives, the permeability of the borderline between reality and imagination." ---Publishers Weekly
Tottenville Review
Ambitious…. what Daniels, and Percy as his medium, have provided is a meditation on trauma, a haunted interior made external: an exorcism provided by the text. It is a rough-and-tumble first book for Percy and a remarkable one.
Winnipeg Free Press
"[A] talented young writer... Chilling and raw."
Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"You can't walk away from Percy's strong debut without feeling like you've spent a frightening moment inside the heads of soldiers who come home from war with nothing but demons, no place to go and no easy role to play. . . . An auspicious debut."
Luis Alberto Urrea
"Jennifer Percy has walked far out into The Twilight Zone and leads us into realms of horror and dread, mystery and high weirdness. I have never read anything quite like it. Are there devils? You might come away from this book thinking it's possible."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Haunting . . . Exposes the raw reality of pain and loss. Many of us have read and heard about the post-traumatic stress disorder . . . Percy has lifted the veil for us.
Alexander Chee
"If you want to understand America now, read Jennifer Percy's Demon Camp. An electric, unflinchingly brave and entirely necessary debut."
Teddy Wayne
Jennifer Percy has taken a sensationalistic, tabloid-worthy subject and explored it in a remarkably clear-eyed and empathetic fashion, without a trace of condescension. Demon Camp is not only luminously written and exhaustively researched; it's an important account of post-traumatic stress disorder in modern warfare.
Doug Stanton
"Demon Camp is for fans of Michael Herr's Dispatches or Hunter Thompson's own dark journeys through America; indeed, it's hard to describe Demon Camp as anything but a tour de force literary experience: exquisitely written, psychologically deft and nimble, and shocking. Jen Percy writes a book that is at once so singular that it speaks to despair and joy yawing over our collective horizon. Here is a new, utterly surprising world we can scarcely imagine being in, except in Percy's hands."
Esquire
A powerful debut and a haunting portrait of PTSD, and the effects of war on the psyches of the soldiers who fight and the extreme lengths they'll go to to find relief and heal.
Michelle Huneven
"With exquisite patience, a wide open mind, and a willingness that trembles on vulnerability to immerse herself in her subject, Jennifer Percy recounts the terrible, ongoing struggles of soldiers whom the war has followed home. Writing in lucid, beautiful sentences, Percy exposes the great psychic cost of the Bush-era wars as paid by these young men, and gives us to understand that their stories are America’s stories, their demons, America’s demons."
Benjamin Busch
"This wild journey alongside madness leads Percy to the place where myth is conceived and destroyed, our wars overseas brought home as nightmares. You will begin to wonder how much pain is dreamed and if fantasy might be the way to cure it. A unique, fascinating and always surprising book."
Vogue
Gripping.
Donovan Hohn
A triumph of reporting, storytelling, and sympathy. Jennifer Percy writes as if possessed, not by her own demons but by the war-torn lives she documents. Like some pilgrim in a latter-day Inferno, with machine gunner Sergeant Caleb Daniels for her Virgil, she has descended into an all-American hell, eyes open, notebook in hand, and returned with this haunted and haunting fever-dream of a book.
Bookforum - Jeff Sharlet
[A] darkly brilliant book… Remarkable… Startling, precise prose.
John D'Agata
Beneath the taut, wry surface of Jen Percy's Demon Camp is a deeply felt investigation that is marvelously disturbing—-a pitch-perfect blend of reportage, meditation, and outright fantasy that beautifully captures the wounds of mind and heart in ruins.
the Oprah magazine O
A chilling work of narrative non-fiction.
Claire Vaye Watkins
"Demon Camp is the most urgent, most harrowing book to yet emerge from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jennifer Percy is a brave and relentlessly powerful witness, again and again confronting us with the monsters of our own making. Written with haunting austerity, this exceptionally important book must be read not only by every voter but by every one of us yearning to be more humane."
Portland Oregonian
The writing is beautiful… Percy has a photographer's eye… She deftly makes this story part of a bigger picture — for her, what happened to Caleb Daniels is a key to understanding the way America deals with war and its aftermath.
The Daily Beast - Brian Van Reet
"Thrilling . . . Percy is on to something essential here: understanding PTSD is one key to understanding our present cultural moment."
Kim Barnes
This is the book I’ve been waiting for. Lyrical, haunting, surreal, as fiercely brave as it is fearsome, Jen Percy’s Demon Camp is both damning and redemptive, a shot straight to the hellish heart of war.
The New Inquiry
"The most unusual and beautiful portrait of trauma to come out of the last thirteen years."
Los Angeles Times
"Shines a bright light on America's wounded psyche. . . . Percy's beautiful, lucid writing takes the reader into the lives of soldiers wrestling with faith in this often harrowing book on the personal, cultural, and political costs of war."
Dexter Filkins
Demon Camp is the amazing story of one man’s journey to war and back. It’s a tale so extraordinary that at times it seems conjured from a dream; as it unfolds it’s not just Caleb Daniels that comes into focus, but America, too. Jen Percy has orchestrated a great narrative about redemption, loss and hope.
New York Times Book Review
Visceral, seductive… It’s hard to pull away… Percy’s narrative artfully upsets a common misperception: that all veterans’ experiences of war are alike.
Shelf Awareness
Percy seems to have been schooled in the Hunter Thompson/Tom Wolfe style of immersion journalism…. You can't walk away from Percy's strong debut without feeling like you've spent a frightening moment inside the heads of soldiers who come home from war with nothing but demons, no place to go and no easy role to play.
Esquire.com
A powerful debut and a haunting portrait of PTSD, and the effects of war on the psyches of the soldiers who fight and the extreme lengths they'll go to to find relief and heal.
Vogue.com
Gripping.
The New Inquiry - Jesse Barron
"Percy’s book gets so close its subject’s consciousness that it stops being about any social issue, the way Executioner’s Song isn’t really 'about' the psychology of killers. It’s the most unusual and beautiful portrait of trauma to come out of the last thirteen years."
Library Journal - Audio
04/15/2014
Percy's debut nonfiction work explores the cost of the War on Terror for the soldiers who make it home. Caleb Daniels is a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brought on by the loss of his best friend and many others in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. He struggles with suicidal thoughts and often sees his dead friends nearby, watching him. Additionally, he experiences a malevolent presence he comes to believe is a demon and becomes involved with a religious exorcism group that offers "deliverance" from those demons. Percy digs deep into the sobering truth of the lengths to which soldiers with PTSD will go to alleviate their condition. Detailed accounts about the War on Terror and soldier suicide could be intense for some listeners. Narrator Kristen Potter does a fantastic job of bringing this world to life. VERDICT Best for fans of war-related nonfiction.—Sean Kennedy, Cleveland Marshall Coll. Law Lib.
Kirkus Reviews
2013-11-03
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop turns her sights on the dark story of a soldier with PTSD who is haunted by his demons. This odd blend of nonfiction, meditation, new journalism and self-expression by debut author Percy wants to be so many things that it becomes difficult to sort it all out. For such a gothic tale of horror, it starts sparingly. In a parking lot in woodsy Georgia, the author met a young man named Caleb Daniels, a traumatized veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As the young writer unraveled the soldier's tale, she learned that Caleb's illness manifests itself as an actual demon that he alone can see, a beast he calls "The Black Thing." For Percy, it becomes a way into a culture that she can never fully understand. "In primitive cultures, if one is sick, it has to be a demon, and finding the one who cursed you is halfway to the cure," she writes. "Does the exorcist ever require an exorcism? People see post-traumatic stress as a problem specifically of war, but it's also a problem of our culture. A physical reaction is a sign of societal malaise. Their demons, and America's demons." The author became increasingly embroiled in the story of Caleb and a remote Christian camp where he and other veterans swore of liberation from demons like "the Ruling Level Demon of Antichrist," as well as the dangled promise of salvation. The book suffers from its lack of perspective and straight-ahead reportage--names and details have been changed--but the story goes way over the top when Percy decided that she was suffering from the same conditions as Caleb. "I see the bat in the dark and the bat says suicide and the bat rapes me. But those are just the dreams," she writes. Percy wields language with admirable restraint, but her poetic gifts might be better served in fiction.
