New Book Alert: Eliana Who Sees Us by Amani Jesu; Creepy Demonic Religious Horror

 

New Book Alert: Eliana Who Sees Us by Amani Jesu; Creepy But Spiritual Demonic Religious Horror

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: It would make sense that I would review yet another religious themed book around Christmas. Eliana Who Sees Us by Amani Jesu is a religious horror, which has a bit more emphasis on the horror but also focuses on the spiritual aspects as well.

Eliana is a photographer who just had an awful Thanksgiving in which she broke up with her boyfriend and had a severe argument with her mother. She is about to endure her job on Black Friday of taking pictures of kids with Santa and the occasional family portrait when she sees something unusual. She sees demons clinging to people's bodies. One dangles on a woman's throat. Another holds a man's hand. One man is eerily covered with demons that hang off his back and torso. Even her best friend and roommate, Mariah has one that hangs on her breasts.

There are some very creepy eerie moments that occur because of Eliana's newly discovered second sight. No one else can see the demons, so Eliana explores the possibility that it is a hallucination, possibly a sign of a mental illness. The other terrifying aspect is that she just develops the sight during a regular day at work. Nothing foretells it, no Divine light, no voice from beyond. Not even any earthly signs of a migraine or seizure. (Though a seizure occurs after she sees them). They just are there.

The premise is one of those plots that border on whether what they are experiencing is real or a product of insanity. The book straddles that line between what is real and what isn't. After all, if you can't trust what you see and hear, what or who can you trust?

This confusion and lack of trust can be found in the people that do believe her: her friend, Mariah, a young man, Shay and his close friends, and an author and religious scholar, Jon Addison. When something incredible happens, a person could have loyal friends and supporters, but they could just as easily have people that want to exploit and use them for their own personal gain. Eliana's new abilities give her enormous power to see what troubles others but it also leaves her vulnerable to other's greed and religious myopia.

There is a strong religious undercurrent of relying on faith and that perhaps Eliana's abilities are a gift to help others. Jesu shows this in some of the scariest passages when Eliana is confronted with demonic possession and human avarice in one fateful confrontation.