Demonology (Paperback)

by King James I (Author)
Key Phrases: vnlawfull artes, dead bodie, euerie one, King James, Gods Ape, Simon Magus (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Rick Moody is a traditionalist. Despite his page-long paragraphs, brand-name dropping, obsessive cataloguing of workplace ritual, seemingly random italicizing, and inevitable digs at "multinational entertainment providers," Moody makes classically beautiful short stories. His tools are those of any master storyteller: detail, catharsis, the right word at the right moment. Granted, the details can be unexpected: e.g., comparative values of different Pez dispensers. And his brand of catharsis can be mighty abrupt. "Now the intolerable part of this story begins," he warns us in the title story of Demonology, while "Hawaiian Night" includes the ominous spoiler, "Here comes tragedy." Yet his word choice is always immaculate.

Moody's collection is framed by two stories in which the narrator ruminates over his dead sister. In the first, "The Mansion on the Hill," he speaks directly to the departed:

You were a fine sister, but you changed your mind all the time, and I had no idea if these things I'd attributed to you in the last year were features of the you I once knew, or whether, in death, you had become the property of your mourners, so that we made of you a puppet.

The story promptly turns into a revenge fantasy, with an absurd climax wherein the narrator attacks his sister's former fiancé. "Demonology" deals with the actual circumstances of her death. First we see her tucking the kids into bed prior to her fatal seizure: "And my sister kissed her daughter multiply, because my niece is a little impish redhead, and it's hard not to kiss her." Moody then switches tone smoothly and beautifully as the medics work on the dead woman: "Her body jumped while they shocked her--she was a revenant in some corridor of simultaneities--but her heart wouldn't start." A writer who pins down such fluidities can get up to all the experimentation he likes. We'll go along willingly. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Sending wry, heartbroken characters across the slightly tilted landscapes of his fiction, Moody fosters a low-grade bemusement in the 13 stories collected here. "The Mansion on the Hill," the first and perhaps the best, follows the adventures of narrator Andrew Wakefield as he tries to come to terms with his sister's deathAshe was killed in a car accident just before her wedding. Coincidentally finding himself employed at a ritzy wedding-planning business, Andrew alternates memories of the past with clunky product-speak descriptions of his job. The death of a sister is the theme of the title story, too, a tale Moody confesses at the end is hardly fictional at all, echoing in his fervent first-person declarations the nonfiction stylings of Dave Eggers. First published in McSweeney's, "The Double Zero," another of Moody's stories, describes the humorous failure of a family ostrich ranch. In "Carousel," an aging, low-level Hollywood actress muses on the metaphysics of the movie business and ends up stuck in the middle of a drive-by shooting while waiting at McDonald's to buy orange juice for her daughter ("So why are they here? According to what rationale? Do they even have juice at McDonald's?"). Moody's self-conscious prose strains for hyper-modern colloquial detachment, but too often misses its mark, clanging just off-key. (Jan. 25) Forecast: Fans of Moody's novels and previous short story collection (The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) will rush to flip through this uneven volume. Whether they will stick around to buy or to read all the way through remains to be seen, but the planned 9-city author tour will help.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 84 pages
• Publisher: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC. (November 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1599869462
• ISBN-13: 978-1599869469
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #470,298 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars better than ring of angels, June 8, 2003

By	Gabriel Murray (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Demonology: Stories (Paperback)

Though endlessly influential from the get-go, Rick Moody's works have evolved considerably. If Purple America felt over-stylized to you, check out Demonology or his subsequent autobiography The Black Veil. They are especially powerful if read in that order. The title story of Demonology alone is worth the cost, and I can believe Moody's claim in an interview that after writing it he has been unable to re-read it. It is a very painful account of his sister's death, thinly veiled in fiction (thin to the point that the narrator comments on the story's autobiographical tint). The reviewers who argue that Moody changes tone too quickly and explicitly gives clues of impending disaster miss the point; the tragedy is a given. The beauty of his prose is in building up the context, prolonging what everyone knows or senses from foreshadowing and from the story's mood, until it reaches the point that he must resign himself to writing the conclusion. It is a beautiful method.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tour de Force that Can't Be Missed!, December 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Demonology: Stories (Paperback)

The collection begins and ends with stories told by a male narrator addressing his dead sister (though the two pieces have nothing in common otherwise). "The Mansion on the Hill" is the story of an underachieving, slightly unbalanced guy who fails, catastrophically, at playing the avian mascot for a fast-food fried chicken joint. He lands a job at the Mansion on the Hill, a theme-room wedding venue that feels more like a funeral home, and slowly becomes enmeshed in the pathetic, lovelorn lives of his mostly dispirited coworkers; the climax of the story comes when he learns that his sister's former fiance is scheduled to be married at the Mansion on the Hill, less than a year after the sister's death. "Mansion" attempts to balance the fine line between comedy and tragedy, but the tone is uneven, and the desired effect is often unclear: was that supposed to be funny, or sad? In the end, it's merely pathetic, in all the various meanings of the word.

"Demonology," by contrast, feels much more intimate and personal, even autobiographical. It recounts the narrator's recollections of his sister in brief, unconnected snapshot scenes, which more or less center around Halloween and trick-or-treating (hence the candy), then jumps to a dispassionate description of her last moments; finally, the narrator addresses the sister, telling her how he feels in her absence despite (and because of) her inability to hear him. Though the narrator is the surviving sibling, he removes himself from the story, placing the focus squarely on his dead sister; it's a nice twist that she becomes present by her absence, alive in memory.

The finest pieces are those told in a fluid, stream-of-consciousness narrative, where the plot must be sifted out with careful attention to the flow of words. In just two-and-a-half pages, "Drawer" recounts an estranged husband's violent destruction of a piece of furniture that is, to him, symbolic of the failure of his marriage, but this can only be determined after the fact (and, probably, after several readings). "Boys" is a beautiful, lyrical story about two brothers growing from infancy to adulthood in the same house. The phrase "boys enter the house," used again and again until it feels like a litany, anchors the story and evokes the lengthy procession of mostly identical days; in the end, it gives way to "boys, no longer boys," as the children assume the role of adults in the face of tragedy.

Not all of the stories work perfectly, of course. "Pan's Fair Throng" is a mostly vexing, overlong piece that blends present-day realism, fairy-tale convention, and Fakespearean tone into a baffling hodge-podge that defies interpretation. It appears to be the story of a young hacker who goes on trial for turning another young man into a monkey by feeding him a potion. Despite some impressively authentic medieval speech, the tone often veers alarmingly into preciously post-modern pop-culture references, and the result is a muddy, confusing pastiche that isn't nearly as funny as the author probably thinks it is. "Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13" purports to be a sale listing for the narrator's rare-book collection, many of which turn out to be "valuable" only because of their connections to central figures (or romantic obsessions) in the narrator's life. The conceit of personal-history-as-catalog-notes would be more interesting if it hadn't already been used, to greater effect, earlier in the book; as it is, the premise doesn't wear well with repetition, and feels a little too cute.

On the whole, however, Moody is a strikingly original and ferociously smart writer with a knack for offbeat protagonists in unusually imagined situations. Although regretfully fond of italicizing words, phrases, and entire paragraphs at times (the reason is unclear; often, it seems intended to give a heavily ironic emphasis to the words italicized, but the author's constant and unrelenting use of the device quickly weakens its impact), Moody writes well and evocatively; the reader may be confused or frustrated at times, but will never be bored. After finishing the book, I think I may finally have found the real reason for the cover image: like Smarties, these little stories are oddly addictive, despite their bittersweet tang. I purchased this book through Amazon.com right after another great purchase, THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez, about an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. Both books are from experimental, somewhat "edgy" New York authors, but that's where the similarity ends, although I recommend each highly.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unthreatening but pandering, September 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Demonology (Paperback)

It's easy to understand Moody's appeal. His short fiction offers facile experimentalism with a commercial gloss. His idea of innovation is to go a little crazy with italics in unexpected places. Readers feel flattered, unthreatened. Moody is a "safe" writer--he'll never take you any place that might unsettle you. The occasional comparisons to Cheever and Updike are especially troubling, because as a stylist Moody has few discernible gifts other than the colloquial crispness one associates with overexcited magazine features. Moody is not a major writer. That he is mistaken for one, and promoted as one, and accepted as one, says a lot about the decline of literary fiction in this country.