Mike's Reviews > To the Devil, a Daughter

This is an odd mixture of mystery, horror, and adventure. The central mystery of the story -- what is going on with the odd young English woman in a villa in Nice, France -- is largely telegraphed by the book's title, though we are nearly a third of the way through the story before things take a turn from the mundane to the fantastic, and all the vague talk of occultism and conspiracy comes to the fore. It is a little distracting that Wheatley is obsessed with connecting Satanism to Communism, but given that this written during the height of the Cold War, it is understandable that the author chooses to align all the enemies of respectable upper class morality and the monarchy. Wheatley's characters are all interesting and vivid, even if his extreme classism and nationalism cause him to rely on overt stereotyping.
Despite the absurdity of the the novel's central conceit -- that Satanists are aided by Communists in their effort take over the world -- the story moves quickly and works as a thriller. The author's piety is tempered by some decent humor and mostly good dialogue. I suppose it would be odd to write about a Satanic cult without getting moralistic, but his protagonists are occasionally such pious, law-abiding twits that I began to find myself indifferent to their fates, and it was only the extreme evil and arrogance of the villain that made me root for the good guys.
There is some really creepy imagery, particularly in the final third of the book, and some interesting asides. For one thing, apparently Wheatley actually met the infamous Aleister Crowley and he's included a story about him in one character's dialogue -- painting an unflattering but plausible portrait of "the Great Beast." Another throw-away idea he includes is that Atlantis was sunk by White Magicians in response to horrible rituals being carried out by Atlantis' Black Magicians. I get the sense that Wheatley was both attracted to and repulsed by the occult movement of his time and it gave him some really cool plot ideas, even if many are never developed.
Worth checking out, despite its flaws.