why aren't demons scary?
He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.1
Because at the end of the day, if there’s a big scary goon around, you just go somewhere else.
Okay, too glib.
Let’s try this: which is scarier, getting stabbed by someone? Or that inescapable voice in your head that goads and shames and belittles you until it feels that the only deserving thing to do is to stab yourself?
Less glib.
Here’s the point. Demons are not about red-skinned humanoids with flaming swords and spiked chains. Not vrock nor hezrou nor glabrezu nor nalfeshnee nor marilith nor balor. Not type, Type I or IV.
Demons are about self-harm. That’s what makes them so fucked up.
Demons are not creatures, running around on some other plane, doing battle with each other for what always look like suspiciously human reasons.
Demons are whisperers. Whisperers and convincers. Underbreath mutterers and mumblers, murmurers and susurrators, grumblers and contemnors, maunderers and mussitators, scolds and rebukes. And not really liars, not really. It’s not so much untruth as an expansion on little truths, little unpleasant truths carefully tended and nurtured, until the melon seed has grown large and full and then shrunk, just a little, skin of wrinkles, full of black rot inside until some little knock collapses the whole thing.
Are demons even really a thing? Is there a place where you can go, if you want to find a demon, to lay hands on it? Is there some journey you can take, some heroic journey where if you overcome enough adversity and display a pure heart you can walk up on one and put your dirk in its throat and make it grovel for its sin and shake your head at whimpered justifications and press through and watch its boiling blood spill and come back to the acre-a-day life you walked away from at the beginning of our story?
No.
Probably not. If there is such a place, you don’t want to be there, not for any reason, least of all those reasons you think most justify it.
None of us, the best of us, even know if there are a million of them, all bickering and hissing for their meat, or if there is one, with little whispering hyphae sliding up all over the place. Does it matter? If they are legion, there will be another to take its place; slice a hyphae, the root grows two.
Even if there are many, they don’t so evenly divide into types. There isn’t the bird-beaked one and the spike-chained one and the fiery one and the snakelady one. There is no taxonomy of demons. If anything, each has a preference, a modus operandi as it were, a preferred sin—and by sin, a way of bringing a human soul low.
Men love allotments and sortings and hierarchies, and repeat them often enough to convince themselves of order when there is none. Demons just have preference. Men will categorize demons by their sin—mens’ sins, that is, as demons have none, for without the possibility of grace there is no sin to forfend. Men will tell you what demons love. In one of the greater ironies, they are not so wrong as may be supposed.
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing.