By Jim Knippenberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Something mysterious was happening to Steve Kissing. Something he couldn't explain. So, like any 11-year-old in the sometimes over-zealous Catholic school system of the 1960s and '70s, he blamed the devil.

That's the story he tells in Running from the Devil: A Memoir of a Boy Possessed, a funny, sad, chatty, memoir about battling demons while growing up in Cincinnati.

Specifically, Kissing grew up in Price Hill, attended St. William's elementary school - "God's holy mountain" he calls it - then Elder High School and the College of Mount St. Joseph. Today, he's an advertising copywriter and contributor to Cincinnati Magazine who lives in Deer Park with his wife and two daughters - and no demons.

Actually there never were any demons, but saying more would be giving away too much about this wonderfully droll coming-of-age book. Kissing thought he was possessed because he began having hallucinations at age 11. He never told his parents or anyone else as the hallucinations got progressively more bizarre, continuing until his final year of high school when things boiled over into a crisis.

To fight what he was pretty sure was the devil come to call, the self-proclaimed dork - "the prince of darkness meets the prince of dorkness," he says at one point - decided to dedicate his life to Christ.

He trains obsessively and becomes a high school track star. For Jesus.

He volunteers tons of time working in Catholic youth groups. For Jesus.

He promises to date only the purest of girls, none of those trashy numbers who actually kiss on the first date. For Jesus.

Problem is, he's a growing lad doing a lot of typical growing lad things. Shoplifting candy bars or stealing money from mom to feed a sugar habit? You bet. Drinking too much beer while way under age? Every weekend. Telling huge lies to cover his tracks? Automatically. Fantasizing - vividly fantasizing - about girls? Almost daily.

Kissing tells his tale with wry and merciless self-mockery, usually delivered in the form of a one-liner or a well-placed adjective. Like the story of his fifth-grade class photo for which he folded a piece of notebook paper to put in his shirt pocket in a "lame attempt at mimicking the sophisticated look of a kerchief in a suit pocket." Or when he discusses his attempts at exorcism using Wonder bread and stolen holy water.

Little things like this, delivered on most every page, add up to a bunch of smiles. So do the oddball characters, like the slightly off-center uncle who hands out slices of bread to Halloween trick-or-treaters. Or the grandfather who gargles every morning with bleach. Even dad's drinking problem - or rather Kissing's way of dealing with it - is handled with humor.

Biggest smile of all is the conflict that arises out of dedicating his life to Christ while still doing his naughty deeds. You smile because, well, most everyone went through the same conflicts growing up.

That's what gives Running its teeth. Though most of us probably never chalked it up to demonic possession, we have all thought, said and done the same things, suffered the same insecurities, had that same angry pimple, fought the same battles, had the same hurt feelings and the same exhilarations. Kissing tells his story in a breezy, pull-up-a-chair style that makes for quick and comfy reading. No deep philosophical meanderings, though the way he presents his actions sometimes leads the reader into a few of his own. It also leads the reader into his own awkward memories, and that's another part of the fun. It forces readers to look back and maybe realize that "Omigosh, I did that. I guess I was that dorky, too."

One warning for west-side readers who intend to go looking for familiar names: Don't. He changed most of them.

One warning for east-side readers who might not consider the book because they think the west side is totally provincial: It is, but the book isn't.