YMMV / The Gospel of Evil

• Anvilicious: Faith is not based on truth, especially if said truth is horrifying.
• Ass Pull:
  • Characters like Giacomo, Giovanni and Don Gabriele are introduced as a sort of instant Vatican Heroes "R" Us when everything seems lost for the heroes, even although absolutely nothing about them had been even mentioned at any other point of the novel. Rather, it had been implied that Camano was the only Big Good available after the Pope's death, which makes their presence all more jarring.
  • The statement that the very horrified masses who heard Camano's reading the Gospel in the Vatican have somehow forgotten it all, to their happiness and the Church's. While it is admittedly never explained how the book's evil magic works, this comes from nowhere and looks like a random attempt to make the ending less negative.
• Base-Breaking Character: Parks. People find her either amusing or unlikable.
• First Installment Wins: The novel is considered very superior to its sequel.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the novel's background it is explained that the next candidate to Pope, Miguel Luis Centenario, hailed from Argentina. In 2013, several years after it was published, we really got an Argentinian Pope, Jorge Bergoglio.
• Informed Wrongness: For a non-religious reader, Pope Peter II's exhortation to reveal the truth about the world so people can "choose freely their beliefs" doesn't sound too bad altogether.
• Narm:
  • That Parks's life has become troubled after her car accident (which killed her husband and daughter aside from giving her amnesia and mediumnic powers) is understandable, but it becomes too over-the-top to be taken seriously after we get scene after scene of her drinking, taking pills, getting stoned, sleeping with random people, doing all the four, and the like. The sequel only makes it worse.
  • Some of the demonic imagery just borders the trite. The possessed Carzo feeling blood thirst as if he had become a vampire, the Gospel containing a chapter named "Book of the Maledictions" and the world being literally ruled by a Satanist cabal are the main examples. Also, while less trite, the Christian stuff doesn't escape from being unintentionally awkward: the narration casually calling Cathars and Waldensians "hateful liars" and the occasional pro-Catholicism Author Tract rival the previous points.
  • The main demon antagonist being named Caleb is bad enough, but the supernatural smell of demonic influence happening to be garden violet scent (while its Godly equivalent is rose scent) is just too random to take seriously. Why violets, given that they don't even smell bad or weird? Or rather, why do God and the Devil have specially exclusive scents?
  • Caleb's Verbal Tic of calling Carzo's name in just every sentence spoken to him can become tiring.
• Narm Charm: The whole scene in which Parks sees Crossman's dead wife and tells him her last words is a monumental Hollywood medium cliché, but it is so well played and placed that it comes off instead as a deeply emotional, heartwarming moment.
• Older Than They Think: The novel was either directly inspired by or concurrently developed with David Zurdo's 616, publisher a year earlier, which also features a Vatican paranormal investigator who finds Satanic presence in Brazil (and has tragic homosexuality in his personal background), a mentally unbalanced female co-protagonist who lost tragically her child and is now related to serial killers in some way, psychics being contacted by Satan, and the revelation that Gnostics were right and the universe is ruled by the Devil, or at least so it looks at first.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Not to the level of the next book, but Parks is sometimes so rude and unprofessional in her interactions with other characters that not even her FBI medium status fully justifies she should get away with it.

---