When he was a little kid, Brian Kettering witnessed his father being murdered by the friendly neighborhood pizza delivery guy. Or maybe it was a fiend from the abyss? To be honest, he wasn’t 100 percent sure what he saw. He was only six years old at the time and his memory was a little bit unreliable.

Everyone has their own personal boogeyman, and Kettering was no exception. Thirty-seven years after witnessing the grisly murder, he was still being haunted by the specter of a monster he called “Doomstalker.” Kettering knew that one day he and his father’s killer would stand face to face—and only one of them would walk away alive.

As a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, Kettering was familiar with druggies, rapists and pedophiles. He was clueless, however, about pre-Christian ethnology, demonology and Pharaonic magic. They didn’t teach that kind of stuff at the police academy.

Now that the Doomstalker was scratching at his front door, Kettering needed help badly. There was a monster loose in L.A. and it was coming for him and his family. If only he could get his hands on a copy of The Necromancer’s Manual (or maybe a Death Note), then he might have a fighting chance.

Kettering knows he’s caught in an escalating situation but author Gary Brandner tells his story in the most roundabout manner possible. For example, the first third of the novel is mostly about Kettering’s failing marriage. After a while, you start to wonder if the author is using the Doomstalker as a metaphor for divorce. Spoiler alert: he’s not.

Eventually, with the help of his foxy new girlfriend, a police department psychiatrist and a community college professor, Kettering figures out everything. Once exposed, the demon has no choice but to reveal itself: “Its body grew and lengthened, its shoulders hunched into peaks. The legs grew thick and powerful, and the arms stretched down to its ankles. The curved talons clicked together as the fingers moved.” And the face, writes Brandner, “shifted and swelled and broke apart into a leathery devil’s mask.”

Doomstalker may be a solid horror novel featuring a monster older than recorded history, but it is nonetheless a product of its era. Published in 1989, it suffers wildly from outdated social signifiers. For example, Kettering’s son complains that his father isn’t cool like Bill Cosby (!!) and telephone answering machines are described as “high-tech gadgets.” There’s even a little bit of casual homophobia sprinkled about. I don’t think you could get away with that today.

And finally, it occurs to me that even the title of the book is somewhat dated. Doomstalker sounds like the name of an 80s-era thrash metal band, doesn’t it?

[Doomstalker / By Gary Brandner / First Printing: December 1989 / ISBN: 9780449145777]