City of Bones

“Not that the humans didn’t have their uses. The boy’s green eyes scanned the dance floor, where slender limbs clad in scraps of silk and black leather appeared and disappeared inside the revolving columns of smoke as the mundies danced. Girls tossed their long hair, boys swung their leather-clad hips, and bare skin glittered with sweat. Vitality just poured off them, waves of energy that filled him with a drunken dizziness. His lip curled. They didn’t know how lucky they were. They didn’t know what it was like to eke out life in a dead world, where the sun hung limp in the sky like a burned cinder. Their lives burned as brightly as candle flames—and were as easy to snuff out.”

This segment is from the perspective of the demon who enters Pandemonium in Chapter 1, and it shows a different perspective of demons than is seen in the rest of the book. In the Shadow world, demons are thought of as destroyers who leave behind dead worlds to move on to the next place full of life they can take. This demon makes it clear he is at the club to siphon life, and he shows disdain for the humans who take their vitality for granted. In addition to an urge to destroy, Clare shows the demon’s motivation to reclaim what it feels it has never been able to have—a living, thriving world. While many demons may only wish to destroy, this perspective suggests there are at least some demons who want something better than what they have. Given the nature of demons, it may be that they cannot help but destroy life, which means they can never have anything but the dead world this demon refers to. The term “mundie” the demon uses is short for mundane, one term applied to regular humans.