Customer Reviews

Demon Under Glass

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Demon Under Glass is based on a film of the same name (I haven't seen it yet), but I found the book very interesting anyway. It was about a team of scientists with the brilliant idea of capturing a Vampire to study. Even after the project's leader is killed, they keep going with a new doctor in his place. Of course everything goes wrong as happens with all these brilliant ideas. But I enjoyed the way they treated the Vampire like a lab rat and how the writer makes us question the humanity of the captors more than the vampire. I'm a little leery about the homo-erotic parts of the book with the Vamp and the Doctor, but overall, it was cool.

The layout of this novel is pityful.
It is not even justified on the right side and it is so full of typos it becomes quite hard to read, mostly because the typos results in meaningful words which have no meaning in the sentence (automatic ortography check?) such as ''you're'' instead of ''your''.

The novel itself is far from bad. People say the film it is based on is one of the worst in centuries, which I cannot discuss because I have not seen it.
The story is good, though: new, interesting, full of possibilities. Writing is proficient and characterization convincing: Simon and Joe are sweet (even the vampire, yes, though he is a blood thirsty SOB) and sexy.
They are involved in a complex relationship based on a mutual mental and physical attraction: both are straight but while the vampire accepts his attraction and acts accordingly Joe has more problems.
Both are clearly described through the eyes of a woman, which is sometimes unappealing to a gay reader, but Ms Warner has nonetheless the nice idea of finishing the novel leaving this attraction unfulfilled. The two have no sex...

That the ending leaves so many loose threads it screams for a sequel is less fortunate.

The main problem in my opinion is that Ms Warner had not the courage to fully reelaborate the script, expanding the plot. Such as it is this short novel is fun and the topic of the heartless, morally biased FBI and or governmental institutions that do terrible, unjustifiable deeds masking them with the usual POOR excuse of "national security" is well developped.
Characters instead could have been fleshed out, their interaction could have been more complex and interesting without making the novel less entertaining. Such as it is a large potential is left unused. Pity.

Between the movie and the book, I ache for more. The Doctor/Vampire relationship (I absolutely do not have a thing for vampires. I hate vampires! But this one rocks!!) has me scouring the web for any sign of more from D.L. Warner and her husband, Jon Cunningham. And that's after 3 years of first having read the book.

It DOESN'T MATTER that the quality of the movie suffers from the low budget. After you read the book and see the movie and really understand what's been accomplished through a good script, excellent acting, and the chemistry of the main characters, "Joe" and "Molinar" (Garett Maggartt and Jason Carter), you see that it is a treasure worth keeping. I'm so glad that the novel-turned-movie was taken seriously and not camped up too much, stylized, or deemed "quirky". The story paints a serious world of unethical research, government-type cover ups, and an innocent, compassionate doctor caught in the middle. This is done convincingly and detailed in amazingly very few pages! (way too short, but a testament to the gravity and power of the story).

The movie tries to follow the novel, but understandably cannot go the distance. I only regret that the dream sequence was more clearly indicated as such, and that the ending could've played out true to the novel. (The things Molinar says to Joe, to assure him that he's not really going to hurt him during his escape, are hot as hell.) And it's even more intense that Joe doesn't even realize how badly the vampire wants him and exactly what his intentions are. (I love "the chase", the one character not giving it up too easily to the other.) It made me wonder at the reason for leaving certain gay content out, when clearly the team was professional, danced awfully close to the gay theme, arriving short of being too obvious, but not obvious enough in my opinion. I mean finally, a suspenseful, psychological, dramatic work of fiction (in spite of the blood) that has two men - who can be taken seriously - bound in a complicated attraction that doesn't disappoint with predictable, disposable sex, but continues to pull the sexual tension taut well after the last page. It's the best kind of sex - Molinar's violent desire for Joe, Joe keeping his distance. Hot hot hot! And it does go on to deliver the goods, but that's another novel. *cough* (D.L. Please write more! You have the makings of something great.)

All of the actors were perfect. I was especially impressed with the lady cop as well as the scientists. Taken in its entirety, this is a very special project (movie and book should be experienced together by M/M lovers) and worth so much more than what I paid for it, in terms of what one looks for in a fulfilling novel/movie experience.
Thank you thank you thank you, D.L. and Jon! After 3 years, I still hurt for more.

I'd like to review the film and novel Demon Under Glass. First let me start by saying the story is good, the writing isn't bad. The Demon Under Glass film was written by the same people who wrote the novel, D. L. Warner. She actually wrote the novel at the same time as she wrote the film. The novel however has double the plot length, and, though obscure, bears an interesting plot. The film Demon Under Glass was a low budget horror film of the early 2000s and the plot of the film is only about half the plot. First, a comparison of the film to the novel since both were written at the same time. The novel is about double the length, in regard to story content. Demon under glass is a very unique story.

A vampire going by the name of Simon Molinar gets captured by the government. He's kept in a high tech cell where doctors study him in secret while the general public remains unaware that vampires truly exist. Molinar under-goes several cruel experiments which cause the reader to question: Who are the monsters here? The vampire actually befriends one of his captors, a Dr. Joe McKay. McKay was a last minute replacement for a doctor who had been killed while they were trying to capture Molinar. Despite being a killer, you start to see the vampire as tragic anti-hero.
Molinar is unashamed of who and what he is and is a survivor. You come to realize he's not the most evil being in the story. Molinar is cruelly experimented on. His confinement consists of a small room with a two way mirror and a metal casket-type of box that is locked from the outside while he is sleeping. They keep him in the casket by night, throwing off his sleep pattern, as to be certain he can't escape while they are studying him by daylight (which will burn him). One particularly cruel test is when they expose a section of his arm to varying degrees of sunlight to see how severely it would burn him and then when it is over they refuse to feed him blood as to see how quickly he can heal without feeding. After a time the group decide to destroy the vampire now that they have finished studying him.

Since he is a killer they would rather keep in captivity a specimen that has not taken human lives. It's mostly politics at this point. Molinar manages to escape and this is where the film version ends. I feel at this point D. L. Warner felt her liberty as a writer and started to stretch her legs into the world of Gothic horror / Scifi but you would have to read the novel to know the rest of the story.

It's a refreshingly unique take on the vampire story. The symbolism is a little heavy-handed. Characters like Joe McKay spell things out for you with dialog that might as well be shouts of 'The vampire's not evil! My bosses are!' The novel's ending felt like the start of an ongoing book series which never actually happened.

Other than these flaws I really do like the book and film. Te film gets points for being a verbal translation of the novel, unlike Queen of the damned, which had nothing to do with the novel of the same name or the 1944 version of The Canterville Ghost which was nothing more than World War 2 propaganda.

The biggest problem with Demon Under glass is the budget must have been
a literal shoe string.

The film Demon Under Glass has a laughable budget.

The first time we see Molinar in the film it's before his capture. He's roaming a city looking for a prostitute to feed upon. the film makers had to tell us he's a vampire immediately by having him pause to lick his fangs. The next flaw is during Simon's capture as the men are 'beating' him there is no sound. I don't know if this is meant for dramatic emphasize but it just makes it all the more obvious that they are pounding on nothing.

The 'High tech' facility holding Molinar isn't very High tech at all. As I said, it appears to have been filmed in someone's garage and the visuals work much better in the novel. The budget was unquestionably low. The telephones used were out of the late eighties at best. Even the cell phones were out of date, looking like the lower quality ones sold in the mid-nineties, the disposable kind. I always figured a secret government agency would have nicer cell phones. Even Joe Dawson's mobile phone on Highlander the series (1995) is more modern than what we see in Demon Under Glass. Also for a film made in 2002 and set in a high tech lab their computers look to be at least ten years old.

I like the ideas projected in Demon Under Glass. And the actual story is very good. With a higher budget this could have been a fine movie. I was disappointed that the story of the film is only half of what's in the novel though what is in the film surprisingly IS faithful to the first half of the novel. It's as faithful as you can get with a very limited budget.

If you can get past the weak moments, the actual story and ideas behind it are very interesting. It's certainly a unique vampire film and I'd rather watch the Demon Under Glass film or read it's novel than watch the God-awful film version of Queen of the damned or Twilight. I actually sincerely wish the Rifftrax guys (formerly Mystery Science theatre) would heckle Demon Under Glass. It would be such a pleasure to watch their heckling of this. I like Demon Under Glass but I love watching things I like get made fun of. It's better than some of the successful vampire films out there. It's the vampire equivalent of Plan 9 from Outer Space only with meaning and substance.

I enjoyed it very much - but I am a huge slash fan and think vampire fiction is a lovely sub-category of the slash genre.

Simon is a bundle of contradictions. Intellectual and charming AND a cold-blooded killer. More than anything, he reminds me of my cats. Stalking and killing is just part of his nature. Should he be condemned? (I've never been able to hate my cats...)

Certainly not the best slash I've ever read. But pretty darn good.

This book is a tie in to the film Demond under glass.
It's writen by different authors, each giving a unique take on the characters from the film.
Given the intense relationship between the two male leads, it might not be to everyones taste.

This garbage is even worse than the film was, which, if you've seen it, seemed to be impossible. Save your money and your mind!