Chapters 1-2 Summary

Kiriel, one of the legions of devils in hell, is fed up with his humdrum existence there and decides to take possession of the body of a recently deceased human. He decides he wants to smart small and slip into a life already in progress. He wants a body that is in good working condition and that is relatively free from privation, and belonging to someone who has relatively few responsibilities in the world. Given these criteria, he thinks his ideal candidate for "body-snatching" is a middle-class suburban American teenager whose parents have divorced, allowing him to be relatively unsupervised. He settles on a seventeen-year-old high-school student named Shaun Simmons, 'hijacking" his body when the boy is hit by a speeding cement mixer when he stepped into its path from behind a parked SUV. "It was a fast-motion fill-up," reports Kiriel...