How to Make Friends with Demons [Hardcover]

Graham Joyce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2009

William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family - his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter's new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu - nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons! For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices. After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney's life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and forgotten deceptions surface. Secrets threaten to become exposed. To weather the changes, William Heaney must learn one thing: how to make friends with demons!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

World Fantasy Award–winner Joyce (The Facts of Life) introduces psychic, alcoholic rare book fraudster William Heaney in a gripping, emotional and satisfying tale. William's ability to see demons is one of many things that haunts him: his wife has recently left him; a beautiful demon-possessed woman is stalking him; and his favorite charity will close unless his latest forgery finds a buyer. When his friend Seamus, a troubled Gulf War veteran, gives William a strange book and then blows himself up, William finds himself on the brink of literal and metaphorical hell. Joyce effortlessly sustains multiple plot lines in smooth prose, by turns comic, philosophical and deeply terrifying. The result, while at times a bit marred by tacked-on political pontification, is a profound meditation upon the evils of cruelty, self-absorption, cowardice and inaction. (Oct.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Night Shade Books; 1 edition (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597801429
• ISBN-13: 978-1597801423
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,952,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Winner of the British Fantasy Award, January 3, 2010

By 

The Mad Hatter "booktionary.blogspot.com" (NY State, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: How to Make Friends with Demons (Hardcover)

William Heaney committed an occult transgression in his youth which has been plaguing him for 20 years. He is a very flawed person who despite trying to do his best is his own worst enemy. Heaney deals with the fact that he sees demons by trying to do good in a Robin Hood style with his not so merry band of book forgers. The dialogue is the strongest part of the book with many witty and honest lines.

The demon factor barely comes in and neither the British or American titles seem entirely apt because of it. The story had its slow parts and had little semblance of a plot for the first half, which I found disconcerting as the main character is seemingly traipsing about, but that is only because this isn't treated as your normal modern day Fantasy with a mission in mind from the start as it is more of a general lit story that could fine a home in many bookshelves next to the likes of Nick Hornby. It is all about character growth and human interaction. That said the occult underpinnings are there and very realistic in their approach and tact.

If you have friends who always say Fantasy isn't for them this could act as a good bridge book between more standard Fiction and genre. If you are expecting something Epic look elsewhere, but for an interesting character driven tour of London with some very flawed characters this is definitely worth checking out. The look into book forging was also quite intriguing.

How to Make Friends With Demons was published as Memoirs of a Master Forger in the UK where it also won the British Fantasy Award.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another beautiful novel by Graham Joyce, August 6, 2010

By 

Stefan "Stefan" (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: How to Make Friends with Demons (Paperback)

Reviewing Graham Joyce for fantasy readers can be tricky, because his novels are often firmly set in our contemporary reality, with only minor fantasy elements. In addition, those fantasy elements are often only visible to the narrator of the novel, creating the impression that they may be figments of the narrator's imagination. Regardless of the fact that Graham Joyce has won a handful of British Fantasy Awards, you could label his books as magical realism, literary fiction, fantasy, or a mixture of all three. The author himself calls his style of writing "Old Peculiar," which is a perfectly fitting way to describe the atmosphere of novels such as The Tooth Fairy and Dark Sister.

How to Make Friends with Demons is another great example of Graham Joyce's distinctive style. Narrator William Heaney is a more or less regular middle-aged man: boring government job, divorced with two kids, likes seventies music, has a drinking problem. Oh, and he believes that there are 1,567 varieties of demons that can possess anyone at any time. Someone else claims to have identified 4 additional demons, but Heaney thinks he's just confusing demons with psychological conditions -- and then labels excessive footnoting as a demon a few sentences later.

Heaney as a main character is fascinating -- literate, self-deprecating, tortured by his past. He sells expertly crafted literary forgeries, only to donate all the proceeds to a struggling homeless shelter. The novel is told in his voice, which leads to lots of gently ironic prose and gorgeous word choices, frequently funny and always incisive:

"Despite the fact that I work for a youth organization, I'm not great at talking with teenagers, even my own. In fact, I'm useless at it: there, let it be said. They hit thirteen and they are swallowed up by the Valley of Demons for seven years. I do know that some people don't emerge until they are thirty-three-and-a-third, but most come out from the undergrowth clutching, by the time they are twenty, a shiny nugget of reasonableness."

(By the way, this novel was published in the UK as Memoirs of a Master Forger and under the pseudonym William Heaney -- the name of the main character. Reinforcing the impression that the novel has autobiographical elements: Graham Joyce worked for the same government organization Heaney runs in the novel.)

There is much to love in this novel: its plot is slowly and expertly revealed through a combination of looks at Heaney's present-day life and flashbacks to his college days. Even minor characters are drawn with such care and precision that I found myself thinking about them long after I finished reading. On one level you can simply read this book as an enjoyable contemporary fantasy, but there are deeper themes running through it that connect in surprising ways, some of which I only realized days after finishing the novel. Another aspect I enjoyed is its intimate and knowledgeable look at the city of London, especially its many pubs and taverns. Even though I have no idea if all (or any) of them are real, they were so beautifully described that I wanted to visit all of them.

It had been a while since I read an entire novel in one day, let alone one sitting, but this one was just impossible to put down. Only about 300 pages long, How to Make Friends with Demons is a beautiful novel that's simply over too soon. Recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lovely Book, April 25, 2010

By 

feralchica (Mountain View, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Make Friends with Demons (Hardcover)

Really enjoyed this one. I'm not sure it is fairly characterized as fantasy (though I'm using the tag for want of anything else), but anyone who reads the more literary end of F&SF is likely to enjoy it. I think the review blurb got it entirely wrong. I'd call it an elegant, well plotted and very well written meditation on the nature of suffering and grace, of the sort that gives a prism or window on the rest of the world for days or weeks after one puts it down. Mileage varies of course. Even though the genre and format are very different, it reminds me more than a bit of RA MacAvoy on one hand, and the best of John Gardner on the other. Joyce thinks in, and keeps, the fictional dream in a way which I think requires great craft -- good enough craft to be mostly invisible and leave one changed for the ride.