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GOT DEMONS?

“Got Demons?” is original art by Kamila Wojciechowicz-Krauze, of Warsaw, Poland, at Kama-arts.com. Used by permission. Copyright 2023 by Kamila Wojciechowicz-Krauze and Timothy Shaull. All rights reserved. In the image, on a crowded city street, a young Black girl must step over a large alligator in order to get to school.

Hello. You have reached the website for WhippoorwillO, a historical fiction in five books, which can be downloaded here for free for your personal use. To simply download, follow the link to the WhippoorwillO page, at the top of this Home page. Or you can read this brief explanation of the work.

WhippoorwillO is about Demons, their nature, habits and how to get along with them. A Demon, as the word is used here, is not the bogeyman that children see in the shadows at Halloween. Demons are symbolic for the unconscious forces that live in many of us, certainly within the author, forces that cause serious problems for their host, and often for other people as well, sometimes really terrible problems. Such a concept is probably anathema to anyone in psychotherapy, perhaps schizophrenic, but it makes for a good story, and that’s what is needed here.

If WhippoorwillO were just one more horror story, there would be little to recommend it. There are so many excellent horror stories available already, by writers in that genre far more talented than the author. WhippoorwillO aims at ways to get along with Demons, which might be somewhat novel. In their travels, the hero and heroines of the story discover ancient paths of spiritual liberation from many cultures. The protagonist Jed, a native of Lagos, Africa, meets a Muslim man on the slave ship who teaches Jed about reading, books, the printing press and Islam, showing Jed his sacred copy of the Koran. Later, in America, Jed becomes lifelong friends with a Chinese indentured servant named Gus, who teaches Jed about Tai Chi. Jed attends a hush harbor one night, the secret ecstatic worship ceremonies practiced by Black slaves in America, where a nameless Black woman teaches Jed to hum along when words don’t work. He meets a gypsy tinker man, a refugee from the caste system of India, whose exotic wife tells Jed about reincarnation. A Native American living in the forest close to Jed, contributes some wisdom from the vanished indigenous culture. But the most intriguing path Jed discovers is found in the writings of the Sufi mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rumi, researched for Jed with some difficulty, by the educated farm mistress Ruth Bennett, a graduate of a Baltimore finishing school.

WhippoorwillO is quite long. Readers looking for something shorter might be interested in the Tracks page, linked at the top of this Home page, which will contain short descriptions of events in the author’s life that led to his interest in Demons and Buddhism.

For comments, questions or suggestions contact the author at Tim.Shaull@gmail.com