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1973 was the year that William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist hit the big screen, and the novel, published in 1971, peeked out the top of beach bags across the globe. With the release of The Exorcist, a seal was broken in the literary world. Religious fiction taboos were cast out like a demon from a clergyman, and the world embraced a contemporary version of the most ancient of boogie men.

Like rubbernecks at a car crash, we couldn’t look away. We had seen the face of evil, and we wanted to see more. And more faces are exactly what we got. The Satanic thriller bombarded the fiction market, and the public ate it up faster than you could say Beelzebub. Popularity of the Omen Trilogy was such that the name ‘Damien’ became synonymous with evil, and every grandma at the church picnic knew that 666 was the number of the beast.

But what about now? The horned god has taken so many forms since Rosemary gave birth to the baby with his father’s eyes. The diversification of Lucifer’s entertainment career has been stretched to include every guise imaginable. He’s been portrayed as an animal, a child, a man and a woman. He’s been repulsive and he’s been charming. He’s been a priest, a lawyer, a politician, and a ball of flaming space ash. That jar of bubbling green liquid in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness looked more like anti-freeze than it did the Anti-Christ.

And you can’t swing a hellcat these days without hitting an actor who’s played the fallen one. We’ve seen everyone from Al Pacino to Adam Sandler take on the role. But since Linda Blair crab-crawled down that staircase in 1973, has the devil really been frightening?

Hunger for satanic fiction has been waning for some time. Now most people feel let down if they settle down to the latest thriller, only to discover that the mystery antagonist is the devil himself. Oh. The bad guy is Satan? Yawn. Quite simply, it’s been done. It’s been done to death. Satan has been force-fed to us for thirty years, and we are choking on him.

Anti-Christ themes have grown redundant in the novel market, while film demons have been reduced to a comedic level. This is not for lack of creativity on the part of those brave writers that still attempt an original twist on Catholicism’s bad boy. This is no doubt a challenging endeavor; to portray the Dark Lord in a new light.

But, until someone can actually do this well enough to recapture the music of that first phrase uttered backwards in Latin, I say we let Old Nick enjoy his retirement from the world of fiction. The devil’s had his day, and now it’s time for him to pack his pitchfork, step aside, and make way for newer monsters. As he hoofs off stage, we’ll let him stop and take a bow, a final moment of glory for the days when he was king, the days when he scared us the most. After all, it’s nothing personal. This is the information age. We bore more easily now. Our demons will just have to learn to keep up.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.