Demonology: k, eng 320FIC029000 01Little, Brown, Moody, Rick: 9780316588744: Amazon.com: Books

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Demonology Hardcover – Bargain Price, December 31, 2000

by k (Author), Brown eng 320FIC029000 01Little (Author), Rick Moody (Author)

3.7 38 ratings

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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 detail, catharsis, the right word at the right moment. Granted, the details can be 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 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 "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 "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

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Print length

306 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown and Company
Publication date

December 31, 2000
Dimensions

5.98 x 1.12 x 8.56 inches
ISBN-10

0316588741
ISBN-13

978-0316588744
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3.7 out of 5

38 global ratings

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I like all Rick Moody's writings and this book is exceptional

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2018

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I like all Rick Moody's writings and this book is exceptional. These stories are very well written and engrossing. Mr. Moody gets into his characters so you know what they are thinking and experiencing like no other writer. This is the second time that I have read this book.

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2013

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Nothing like the last story. It's incredible. I've read it a thousand times and every time it surprises me. But Rick's work is always superb. Anyone who can combine the comic and the dark so seamlessly like in real life, is a genius.

Kindle edition is unreadable

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2014

The Kindle edition of this book is so poorly formatted as to be unreadable. I understand that e-publishing tends to happen on an abbreviated or aggressive schedule, but there is no excuse for this. I'll attempt to get my hands on a paper edition: I'm sure Moody deserves better. (Is it possible that the poor quality of the Kindle edition is related to the Amazon/Hachette problems?)

One person found this helpful

Four stars and Four stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2012

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It's difficult to adequately rate a book. A big fan of Rick Moody may wonder how I could rank this book four stars when I also reviewed John Cheever's entire "Collected Stories" with four stars. I guess I ranked Cheever four stars because I was more ranking the quality of the other reviews than the stories. It's often detrimental to a collection to focus solely on the best. Yes, the best is the best for a reason, but it's a book and a whole and deserves to be read in its entirety. As a young writer, I've found that reading the worst stories by a good author can be informative in different ways and equally beneficial, although perhaps not as rewarding as reading the best.

This is a solid collection of stories in the sort of post-mod sense of what a story should be. Rather than focus on immediate contemporaries, both Barthelme and Beckett appear in name and in prose forms in the stories in Demonology. Moody frequently mentions the form the "Roman a clef" which, according to wikipedia, is a "novel with a key" and a type of fictionalized non fiction. I tend to associate with writers like Witold Gombrowicz, but there are plenty of other writers writing today and who've written recently that use this type of non-fiction fiction blend, people like David Foster Wallace and what have you.

I read the book in two days. I thought it was funny, enjoyable. The good stories in it are very good. But there are a few mediocre ones. Mostly, I think that Moody's attempts at the abstracted story forms, his story that is essentially a play-list of songs, are kind of on the right track but not perfect. Maybe, they should end a little sooner. But maybe that's the point. I'm not one to judge.

Regardless, Moody's eye for comic images is great. Pan's Fair Throng deserves note for that if for no other reason.

One person found this helpful

Don't believe the hype ...

Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2001

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I'm not saying Rick Moody is a bad writer. He can shift between social classes and write them all well. He has all the stylistic and linguistic pyrotechnics. He is intelligent, and is trying to deal with more than just ideas.
But this collection lacks true emotional depth. Loss never transcends into grief, insecurity does not go to neurosis, love is never passion. It's small emotions that define this book, and I feel that the more experimental and language-intensive the work is, the more emotional substance needs to be there to support the structure. It's as if he has the same candy coating as Eggers and Wallace, but without the chewy center of hard-to-handle truth.
I liked enough of the style to keep an eye out for future work, but can't recommend this collection as anything outstanding.

16 people found this helpful

khaleesi_of_books

Not my cup of tea

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2021

1 1/2 stars. 4 ok stories
I did not enjoy the rest. Some seemed he was trying too hard to be quirky and write "outside the lines." Others were just not good at all.

Amazon Customer

Congratulations, Mr. Moody!

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2001

Of the novels I've read in my life, I must say that this latest collection of stories by Mr. Moody is perhaps the best. Notice the package of Smarties-brand candy on the cover of the book; a quirky touch, eh? The whole book is like that. Delicious and quirky, with a nostalgia for the things we gobbled greedily as children. Pick up the book in your local bookstore, the small corner bookshop like the one in "You've Got Mail," the movie that starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (but, of course, buy the book at Amazon, because they offer significant savings, up to 30% off). Feel the book's soft, delicious heft. Feel the way, when you flip through the pages, you get the sense that the pages have little pillows of air between them, lending the book a luxurious feel. Mr. Moody's words are that way: luxuriant. They defy genre. Mr. Moody, an Ivy-educated writer, is not a genre writer. Genre writers tend not to be as well-educated, if I'm not mistaken.
One thing you notice about these stories is that Rick Moody has chosen each word carefully. Each word means something. That's not really the case in less sophisticated, genre writing like John Grisham's (that's just my opinion; I don't mean to offend fans of genre writing). This is serious stuff: literary fiction. Rick Moody has put a lot of work into this book, that much is obvious. Each page has been carefully considered, with only the best pages making the final cut. I suspect Rick Moody declined a number of social invitations, from friends who admire him and are pleased that he considers them friends, in order to massage these pages into just the right form. You might say, after reading this book, that Rick Moody "has the write stuff."
If you're turned off by "difficult" writing, this isn't the book for you. This volume is for ambitious readers, people who have already read a number of books. As a sign of how difficult this book is, Rick Moody, in the NYT the other day, is quoted quoting Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst notorious for his forbidding seminars. French writers tend to think difficult things; and they phrase them in ways that are difficult for most Americans to understand. But there is heady stuff in "Demonology," and really only one reference that would do if Rick Moody was to really capture the experience of writing this book, and that was a citation of Jacques Lacan.
I noticed, on the thick, luxuriant dust-jacket of this book, that Mr. Moody had switched from the author's photo in which he is depicted with longish curly hair and funky glasses, to a more casual photo, in which he looks wealthier and more carefree than he did in his last author's photo. To be sure, he still looks competitive, like he'd be up for a game of touch football on a big, grassy lawn; but he looks less driven, less vision-impaired than the avant-garde writer he once was, back when he was writing other books that were just as edgy but less assured. This new photo projects greater comfort with his status--he's sure of himself now--and he can be cruel when necessary. In other words, Mr. Moody looks Kennedyesque in this latest photo. I bet there's a story behind that; I can imagine Mr. Moody saying to his agent, "I am tired of just being a pretty, funky face, looking like an East Village poet-slash-action painter. I want to look rich, tousled, as if I am on a yacht. Let's just get down to brass tacks: I want to look like Bobby Kennedy!" I admire both Bobby Kennedy and Rick Moody; there are a lot of similarities between them. Both, for instance, spent/spend a lot of time on the East Coast, and attended the best schools. Both have a certain edge about them, but are still very admirable. Yet they remain complex, enigmatic.
There is a recent review in the NYT of this book, in which a fellow named Walter Kirn, who writes similarly "edgy" books, points out that short stories have traditionally been the "R&D department" of fiction -- that is, research and development, where white coats are worn, new ideas are tried out, brains storm, and prototypes are rendered. That was a brilliant image, a pretty cool insight that got me thinking. Walter Kirn proves, with that review, that he is as blithe and assured as Rick Moody. I bet Rick Moody has never met Walter Kirn, and I bet he will never thank Walter Kirn, in person or over the phone, for that review.
I guess I want to close this review by saying that I think Rick Moody has given us a gift with this new book: he has shown us that fiction writers need not be shallow, simple, unsophisticated people. They can be complex, too, with different moods and different aspects, each of which is worth celebrating. They can grow. And sometimes, in addition to writing a book that reflects, quite elegantly, those changes, a new author's photo is required as well, on the dustjacket.
Highly recommended.

14 people found this helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Matty Vans

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 27, 2017

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Love this book. Love Moody's short stories. Armoir is my fave.

Doc

Not for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2018

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One or two of the stories were very good but in general I couldn't get into this writer's fast pace of writing. Perhaps this is because I needed to slow down.

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