By: KC Cronin
Barry Maher opens this novel with a Harvard professor riffing on Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby in the late sixties, tossing off the idea of a modern version called The Great Dick, and from that first scene you understand you’re in the hands of a writer who is doing something more layered and more intentionally literary than the horror-comedy packaging might initially suggest. The Great Dick is a genuinely ambitious book wearing the clothing of a wild genre romp, and the combination is more satisfying than either element would be on its own.
What reading it actually feels like is being pulled along by someone who is a gifted and slightly unhinged storyteller, someone who leans in at the important moments and keeps you slightly uncertain about where the floor is. The novel produces a specific kind of pleasurable unease, the feeling of enjoying yourself more than you think you probably should be, given the things happening on the page. Steve Witowski is messy and morally compromised and completely recognizable in his tendency to rationalize everything uncomfortable that crosses his path, and Maher writes him with an affection that stops just short of excusing him. That balance is what keeps you invested rather than irritated.
The book’s central tension, between Steve’s adamant refusal to believe in anything supernatural and the increasingly undeniable evidence that something very wrong is happening in and around Victoria’s crumbling church, works as both a plot engine and a character study. His skepticism isn’t stupidity. It’s a coping mechanism that has served him through a life full of situations he’d rather not have fully processed, and watching that mechanism fail in real time is where the book gets genuinely interesting beneath the surface entertainment. The themes of belief, denial, accountability, and the cost of staying willfully blind to what’s right in front of you are ones that don’t require a demon to feel relevant. They’re the architecture of how a lot of people move through their actual lives.
Maher’s prose style is distinctive in a way that takes a chapter or two to fully calibrate to and then becomes one of the main pleasures of the reading experience. He has a deadpan rhythm that makes the darkly funny moments land without telegraphing them, and the 1982 California setting is evoked with a specificity that gives the whole novel a grimy, tactile atmosphere. The sex and violence feel organic to the story rather than ornamental, which is not always the case in this genre, and the quieter moments of exhausted tenderness between characters give the book an emotional range that earns its more extreme sequences.
This is a novel born from brain surgery and driven by the particular clarity that sometimes comes from surviving something that could have gone very differently. That origin isn’t just a compelling anecdote. It’s the source of the book’s best quality, its refusal to be cautious, its willingness to go all the way into the dark and find something worth laughing at there. Barry Maher has written something genuinely original and it deserves to find the readers who will recognize it for what it is.
If you’ve ever wanted a horror novel that makes you laugh out loud and then immediately feel unsettled about the fact that you just laughed, The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon is waiting for you on Amazon. Pick it up, clear your evening, and prepare to meet Steve Witowski. He’s a mess. You’re going to love him.
