Bateman- Demonic Origins

  But I was lost in the anxiety of the moment. “I mean do you have a résumé or, like, recommendations because when you tell me that you’ve seen people burst into flame I feel like I’m going crazy—”

  “Mr. Ellis, I was not handed a diploma. I did not go to ‘ghost college.’ I have only my experience. I have investigated over six thousand supernatural phenomena.”
...

  “Well, on whether it’s a demon, or whether it’s a ghost or, in your case, whether the things you created—these tortured entities—have somehow manifested themselves into your reality.”

  “But I don’t understand,” I was saying. “What’s the difference between a ghost and a demon?”

  By the time this question was asked the diner had disappeared. It was only Miller and myself in a booth suspended outside of whatever the real world now meant to me.

  “Demons are malicious and powerful. Ghosts are just confused—lost, vulnerable.” Miller abruptly reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a cell phone that had been vibrating. He checked the incoming number and then clicked the phone shut. During this movement he continued talking as if he had given this information a million times before. “Ghosts draw their energy from any number of sources: light, fear, sadness, anguish—these are the things that make the spirit precedent. Ghosts are not violent.”

  You have demons, the writer whispered.

  “Demons are a manifestation of evil, and they haunt people who have carelessly let them into their lives. Remember what I said about antagonism? A demon appears when it feels it has been antagonized, and what it wants to do, its purpose, is to return this antagonism. Demons are angry.”

Lunar Park, chapter 26