It all started one midsummer’s night when Martin O’Donnell tried to freeze a small pond so that he and his girlfriend could go ice-skating. Even though he was a wizard with a college degree in magical arts, he botched the spell and created a terrifying blizzard in his hometown that lasted 68 pages. That’s 40 percent of the novel btw.

He stood at the center of the storm acutely aware of how much trouble he was in. He had just polished off a bottle of Prigione dei demoni and was a little tipsy. In other words, he wasn’t exactly at the top of his game. Drunk casting wasn’t uncommon with wizards, but it was ill-advised and damn dangerous. Sloppy sorcery could result in missing limbs, multiple eyeballs or planar ruptures. 

If Martin had understood a smidge of Italian, he could’ve avoided his dilemma completely. Prigione dei demoni—the wine he drank—could be translated into English as “prison of the demons.” As it turned out, the label was a warning—a demon named Stefano was trapped inside the bottle. Drinking it was a huge mistake. 

Now the infernal fiend was trapped inside Martin’s body and was causing all kinds of trouble. The two beings were irreversibly merged. Or were they? A seven-foot-tall vampiress thought otherwise. 

Annie-Dol De Jong (great name btw) was doing her best to separate the demon from the human. She hunted Martin like he was an isolated sea lion pup. When she finally found him, she pounced on him in an instant. Her quivering fangs popped out of her mouth and reached to the bottom of her chin. Martin didn’t have a chance to defend himself. 

De Jong’s bloodletting enabled Stefano to become independently corporal, but the huntress didn’t make it to the end of the novel. That’s too bad. She was a big and charismatic figure—a lot like Big Barda, She-Hulk and Thundra—totally compelling and iconic in a comic book sort of way. Unfortunately, she represented a hoary storytelling trope known as “fridging” in which a female character’s death was used by the author to empower a male character’s story arc.  

When Stefano finally appeared, he slowly morphed into a creature with scaly gray skin, enormous webbed wings, predatory glowing red eyes and row upon row of sharp white teeth. “Horns burst from his forehead,” the author added. “His muscles rippled and expanded, and a goat’s tail appeared out of his rear. In just a few seconds, he had doubled in size and shed his fleshy skin to reveal rough crimson fur.” 

With the help of two eccentric vampire hunters, various members of the Sentient Life Brigade, the Goat Gang and his Mr. Miyagi-like uncle, Martin was able to roll back the blizzard and soundly defeat Stefano. He also learned a valuable lesson: never drink another bottle of Prigione dei demoni again.  

[ That Demon Drink / By Adam Lynch / First Printing: January 2026 / ISBN: 9798245837321 ]