Put on your headphones and step into the world of Detective Jack Faust, a man whose life has just taken a turn towards evil. A 40s-style noir thriller audio drama, The Demonic Detective is a juicy tale of vengeance, lust for power, and wickedness.
Private detective Jack Faust gets more than he bargains for when an old friend turns up and asks for help. This good deed turns into a nightmare as Jack is cursed with a demon by a group known as The Coven. Jack must battle with his morality and literal demon within to discover The Coven’s sinister plans.
The Demonic Detective
If you mixed Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, Humphrey Bogart, and and the all-around vibe of Bioshock’s Rapture, you’d get New Salem, Massachusetts, the setting for this tale. Told in your typical audio drama format (imagine a play acted solely through the radio), The Demonic Detective weaves a story of Jack Faust as he battles literal demons in an attempt to cure his city of crime-committing cults. Murder is on the menu — but so are magic, divination, and evil forces. Jason Brasier’s The Demonic Detective is only seven episodes at the time of this review (plus a trailer, prelude, and postlude), but each one manages to pull you in further to the story, slithering sneakily into your brain like a wisp of purple and black smoke, ready to take your soul to the darkness it crept out of.
While I’m not necessarily into crime dramas, The Demonic Detective begs to say “Wait, this one is different.” Colorful doesn’t even begin to define this cast of characters, with the likes of witches, black magic practitioners, and demons intermingling with police, corrupt city officials, and townsfolk just trying to live their lives. The whole city is alive and thriving — or more so squirming. The town’s namesake, New Salem, pays homage to the famous “witch city” while each person we meet along the way alludes to a magical (or biblical) being, like Faust, Pendragon, Zola, and Lilith.
The colorfulness I mentioned earlier effortlessly melds the story together with excellent writing and acting. Each cast member gives life to the character they are portraying, making The Demonic Detective feel like an entire world is contained in each 20-minute episode. Moody, sultry, and a quintessential noir vibe is the name of the game. The stakes are high, and we truly feel like the story and Detective Faust’s life really matter.
I’d also like to point out a fun little worldbuilding aspect of The Demonic Detective that Brasier put in. The audio drama is like a 2-level podcast where we as an audience are listening to it in real life, but it’s also us listening to it as a 40s-50s audience; mid-episode commercials for in-universe services like “witch pills” and other magical products are announced — and I swear that for a second, I am transported to my small ground-level apartment on Essex Street as I sit knitting and listening to my radio.
The Demonic Detective brings back the peak days of audio dramas, before the bright backlights of our numerous screens kept us in a perpetual daze. It allows us to imagine a world of darkness fighting against a world of good, where dark corners hide horrors — but villains-turned-good guys save the day. Listen and enjoy as you’re taken back to a simpler time, in a world not unlike our own.
Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Learn more on The Demonic Detective website, as well as Instagram and Facebook.
