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The first major drama of the summer season is here. It's all Southern Gothic from the get-go and not for the squeamish. Certainly not for those who think all children are adorable or those disturbed by pain inflicted on children.

Outcast (Friday, HBO Canada, 11 p.m.) is the work of The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman and is made for HBO's sister channel Cinemax. No zombies here, but demons abound.

In fact, the supernatural series takes a weary, gloomy view of the world with a sort of sighing recognition that demonic possession is always just few feet away. But are those demons man-made?

There are hints of The Exorcist in the opening episode and some critics have called it an homage to the movie. But there is far more to Outcast than a genuflection to the classic demonic possession movie. Outcast is bleak. Damn bleak, actually, as it weaves a thickly textured narrative about child abuse and the fatal limits of religious belief.

Be warned, mind you, that the first episode contains a deeply disturbing scene. A 10-year-old boy named Joshua smashes a cockroach with his head and eats it. If you cannot imagine watching that, Outcast isn't for you.

Set in the sunless and grey town of Rome, West Virginia, Outcast is mainly about Kyle Barnes (Patrick Fugit), who we meet living in utter squalor in what turns out to be his childhood home. As the series progresses, we discover, with considerable force, what happened to him during that childhood. It was stunning abuse by his mother. But, as we also discover, Kyle takes the view that his mother wasn't possessed, as some locals think. To him, she was simply ill.

Fugit plays Barnes as a man barely able to function. He's hiding, wary and, it seems, drenched in self-loathing. Something else horrific has happened to him, too. He had a family, a wife and a daughter, and something went terribly wrong. Apparently defeated, he's retreated to where he grew up in horrific circumstances.

The story begins to truly click and drive moodily onward when Kyle reluctantly helps the local Reverend Anderson (Philip Glenister), who is trying to perform an exorcism on that little boy, Joshua. Reverend Anderson is no saint. He's almost as morose as Kyle but he believes that demons are in his parish and are possessing people, especially children.

Kyle is suspicious of this easy assumption about demons and the devil. "Why don't we stick to what we know before start blaming the bogeyman again?" he says. And yet when the going gets tough against whatever is residing inside Joshua, it is Kyle who has the power to cleanse him, not the Reverend.

This is the crux of this creepy and admirably tempered series – the questioning of what constitutes evil and the emphatic suggestion that religious belief alone cannot combat evil. Kyle is a strange kind of demon-hunting hero. The context in which he operates is that of the family home – that's where actual evil exists and destroys both children and parents. It is not clear, in any way, that Kyle is doing God's work. What is clear is that Kyle has a special connection to children who are seen as possessed. And that connection exists because he is a victim of abuse.

Soaked in the tradition of the Southern Gothic and anchored in what is still called the Bible Belt, Outcast feels both familiar and unique. It is hazy about what exactly is sinister – the rituals of religion or the way children are treated and stripped of innocence in their own home. There are regular jolts of supernatural trickery, but Kyle looks on these bewildered, suspicious that they exist at all. And what frightens him more than anything is a flashback to his own brutal childhood.

At one point, Reverend Anderson tells Kyle about his doubts and how he felt phony as a religious leader. "I felt a man made his own heaven or hell on Earth," he explains. Later, his confrontation with demonic evil made him religious again. It is Kyle who feels that everything is of this Earth, and what unfurls in Outcast is a test of what both men believe.

Light summer fun, it isn't. A brilliant kind of gloomy, challenging journey, it certainly is.

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