He'd have to be a Republican, right? Hunter Peal is a Republican senator from Colorado who doesn't have much of a chance to clinch his party's nomination until he gets possessed by Satan and swerves wide to the right, promising that the United States will basically take over the world by force, and at home enact race and class apartheid and subjugate women to the pleasures of men.

Not in so many words, of course. Satan's not human but he's politically shrewd and, as you'd expect, a smooth talker. He also has supernatural powers, beginning with creating mass hallucinations of a nostalgic and jingoistic nature and graduating to remote murder, turning a would-be assassin inside out, crushing testicles and forcing political opponents to soil themselves on television or have a stroke, depending on his mood, just by thinking about it.

He can also change into the form of the beast, a goat-hooved, hairy, giant creature with two penises whose sexual preference is to use them both at the same time in a gory rape/murder ritual. This is graphically described and happens more than once in the book, so consider this if you were thinking of reading it.

While originally published in 1981, the year of Reagan's inauguration, this edition was reprinted in 2017. Who was inaugurated that year?

It's startling how many lines from the book, dating from Reagan's "Let's Make America Great Again" campaign, are still a good fit for the disastrous "Make America Great Again" cult that's actually keeping many of Masterton's hell candidate's campaign promises.

In his new introduction for the 2017 edition, Masterton writes "welcome back to the hellish past, and let's hope that it doesn't predict an even more hellish future".

Oh, well….

The candidate's name is Hunter Peal and the story is told in the first person from the point of view of Peal's press secretrary, Jack Russo.

Masterton doesn't waste any time dithering and the book zips along, gradually raising the stakes as it reveals more and more of Peal's infernal power and ambition.

Refreshingly there isn't a lot of quibbling about what's happening. At first, of course, all unusual things are explained away in various ways, because nobody's going to say oh it must be supernatural, probably the devil.

Even when it becomes clear that the Peal campaign is a huge threat to the world, no one dares quit because the only chance is to stay close and hope for an opportunity to do something about it.

A nice touch is that a lot of the devil's power comes from people themselves, from the baser parts of their nature. Greed, lost, anger, violence, envy, all that is buried inside to varying degrees and it is to these elements that Satan can appeal and find strength.

He gets people's votes not in spite of who they are but because of who they are—in part, at least. By the time they find out what they really voted for, it will be too late.

It's all depressingly familiar but an excellent premise for a horror novel and this one is well done.

The first line is "I was often asked, in the weeks after Hunter Peal was elected President, just when I was first convinced he was going to win".