Exorcist Albert Cloister, member of a secret Vatican group called God's Wolves who investigates paranormal phenomena, is called to solve a chilling mission. Several people in the world, have been found with their bones broken by some mystical force after undergoing a hellish Near-Death Experience, and the words "All is Hell" are repeated over and over. The cherry on the cake is a Spanish saint candidate of all people, whose tomb is open only to find him in the same state.
At the same time, psychicatrist Audrey Barrett finds her life shaken by the words of a mentally disabled old man, Daniel Smith, who seems to have a mysterious connection with paranormal forces. Aided by firefighter Joseph Nolan, who rescued Daniel from a no less strange fire, she will have to join forces with Cloister not only to reconcile with her own past, but to discover a terrible truth, contained in the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, that threatens the entire world.
Possibly Zurdo's and Gutiérrez's most known novel.
This work contains examples of:
- Ambiguous Situation:
- What's the relationship between Daniel and Satan? Does he communicates telepathically with him because he has untapped psychic potential? Is he possessed by some kind of Satanic spirit that allows it, as shown in the exorcism? But in that case, why does the connection remain after the spirit is exorcised? Was all the Exorcism a charade by Satan to move the spotlight away from Daniel?
- Satan offers apocrypha as proofs of the awful truth behid Christianity. One is the Gospel of Nicodemus, where Satan accuses Jesus of fearing death, which is all right in context, but the other is the infamous Infancy Gospel of Thomas, who shows Jesus as an Ax-Crazy Creepy Child. This one is not clearly explained how it exactly fits in the plot. Cloister wonders whether the truth made child Jesus evil, but Judas' gospel later reveals not to be the case, as Jesus only found about it in the desert as an adult.
- The Bad Guy Wins: With a twist or two, in particular that the bad guy only wished to become good again to begin with. At the end, Cloister finds Judas' gospel just like Satan wanted, and although it initially looks like Jesus's story is going to repeat, Cloister succeeds where Jesus failed and effectively redeems Satan, saving them all and the entire world.
- Badly Battered Babysitter: Nolan finds himself taking a fifth grade classroom to visit the firefighters' facilities, an experience he finds hilariously traumatic.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Satan desired to take God's place... and only found misery.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
- In this universe, popular TV series The X-Files was secretly written after real paranormal investigation cases, only not from the FBI, but from the God's Wolves.
- Pope Paul IV founded them, and they capitalize on Gabriele Amorth's work.
- Big Good: Ignatius Franzik, the chairman of the God's Wolves and Cloister's own mentor.
- Body Horror: The exorcism shows Daniel is possessed by some kind of black fluid inside his veins.
- Brake Angrily: Performed by Audrey, with the detail that she ponder herself that she could have caused an accident.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: There are a few of them in the novel, like Harrington Durand, Giacomo Zanobi and Audrey herself, and all of them are either explicitly or implicitly off their rocker.
- The Chessmaster: Eugene's drawings turn out to be prophetical for Cloister's mission. That's it. Satan orchestrated the whole novel's plot down to its very background.
- The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Audrey is a successful psychiatrist, but even her secretary and her can see perfectly she is a depressive, unbalanced, alcoholic mess due to her past, and it's not like she refrains herself from behaving like that in public or her own patients either. Really, the odd thing is that she managed to become a successful psychiatrist to begin with.
- God Is Evil: With good reasons, as it turns out God is actually Satan, who impersonated God after the War in Heaven.
- Good All Along: Satan of all people. It's revealed that, after winning the War in Heaven, he realized he had gone overboard and was seeking to return God and him to their respective places.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Audrey and two of her college friends accidentally killed a security guard during a protest for the Gulf War that got out of hand. Later, Audrey's eight year old son disappeared, which she believes to be God's punishment for the former.
- Devil, but No God: As with most Religious Horror fiction, this is a given. It's even commented on by the characters and chalked up to some divine plan, or to some notion that God wants us to know pain so we can recognize Heaven's pleasure and yadda yadda. But in reality, it's because Satan defeated God and turned Him into his slave.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: At the end of the novel, Albert Cloister is turned into a pathetic junkie after reading the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. He ultimately gets better, though.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Apparently, Amazonian shamans are genuinely supernatural, just like Christian stuff.
- Game Face: Giuliu Vasari saw evil's face in a possessed murderous girl in Italy in 1922. But he notes it was more melancholic and sad than evil and terrible.
- Good Wings, Evil Wings: Daniel's dreams show good and bad angels with white and black feathered wings respectively.
- Groin Attack: The Vendange Hotel's director apparently murdered his wife in midst of Satanic sex by stabbing her in the vagina and opening her up.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Albert Cloister gives his life to save a little girl. It turns out to be decisive to save the entire humanity.
- Improbable Age: Barrett is a renowned psychiatrist at 36. In real life, completing both medical school and psychiatry takes at the very least 12 years (8+4), which means she should have had only as many as six years of real professional experience under her belt to become famous. Even harder, if we count that her son disappeared four years before the novel's events, meaning that she suffered a massive tragedy that completely broke her only two years into her career.
- In Medias Res: The novel starts with Audrey asking for confession in her childhood's church, which doesn't happen within the story's timeline until at least half of the book.
- Nay-Theist: Audrey believes that by taking her son away, God is punishing her, unfairly so, for an accidental murder of her youth. She doesn't become Hollywood Atheist, but instead rebukes God and becomes bent on proving He was mistaken.
- Perpetual Molt: Daniel's dreams show a lot of angel's feathers, some of them bloody. It turns out there is no molt, though - he was witnessing the War in Heaven.
- Self-Referential Humor: A student has a T-shirt with the message "save literature, say no to best sellers". This coming from a best-seller clearly inspired by The Da Vinci Code wave.
- Surprisingly Happy Ending: It turns out all that was needed for Satan and God to return to their places was for someone to know the terrible truth and still make a Heroic Sacrifice. Jesus failed, but Cloister succeeds, eventually saving the universe.
- Taking Over Heaven: Satan tried to do this in the War in Heaven. And succeeded. But at the end, this is reversed.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Apparently, what Satan honestly hoped to accomplish with his rebellion was freeing the world from God's tyranny. Be Careful What You Wish For indeed.
- You Cannot Fight Fate: Seemingly so, as it turns out Judas betrayed Jesus in order to protect him, not to condemn him as Jesus himself wanted - and by doing so he caused his very condemn. Judas wonders whether perhaps all was a Batman Gambit by Jesus himself.
