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Overview
Rick Moody's novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer (The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" (The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and admired voices in a generation.
These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody's grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love.
Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the deepest pleasures that fiction can afford.
Synopsis
Rick Moody's novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer (The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" (The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and admired voices in a generation.
These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody's grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love.
Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the deepest pleasures that fiction can afford.
Boston Sunday Herald
...further scrutiny reveals [Moody's words] are also as wll-chosen as the syllables in a sonnet...
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewAmong the swirl of ethnic weddings at a marriage mill in Connecticut, grief-stricken employee Andrew Wakefield plans an evil revenge against his dead sister's fiancé that involves a chicken mask and human ashes. Andrew, the central character in "The Mansion on the Hill," is just one of the many offbeat and troubled characters who populate Demonology, the second short story collection by Rick Moody, the author of the acclaimed novels The Ice Storm and Purple America. In this brilliant, satirical collection framed by the deaths of two sisters, Moody uses his acerbic wit and perceptive eye to address our futile attempts to find meaning and catharsis in our suffering.
Moody's stories navigate long, winding roads over which the author capably propels his readers toward certain intended epiphanies. In "The Carnival Tradition," he plays with the chronology of two aspiring bohemians in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1985, then brings them back to when they met as teenagers ten years earlier on Halloween. What begins as a send-up of scrambling and pretentious artists evolves into a comedy of manners about rich and awkward adolescents, finally becoming a devastating meditation on the loss of love and the death of youthful dreams. The story's maimed protagonist is left alone and isolated.
Moody further displays his penchant for breaking short story conventions when he uses a newly discovered cassette collection to tell of the downward spiral of an upper-class ne'er-do-well. In "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set," notes on the cassette tapes record the rock hits through the 1970s and '80s, as well as the young scion's inability to hold down jobs, stay out of drug rehab, stay in graduate programs, or to develop a meaningful life.
In "Surplus Value Books, Catalogue #13," Moody re-creates the book list of a mentally ill man selling his library. Each title he is selling refers in some way to his obsession with a female graduate student he will never kiss. As the list goes on, the increasing book values and outrageous liner notes become a vehicle for expression of the madman's hysteria.
In the title story, which ends the collection, Moody weaves a compelling ode to a sister who dies suddenly. With the orange flames of Halloween licking the edges of the story, Moody chronicles the sister's difficult but not entirely meaningless life while she takes her kids trick-or-treating. The grief of the narrator is unflinching.
Moody is on firmest ground in Demonology when he takes apart life in suburban America and examines the pieces with his biting humor. His mockeries of social conventions illuminate the raw human feelings of hurt and loneliness in his characters. Demonology proves once again that Moody is a master storyteller who weaves elaborate tales, bringing readers right where the writer wants us: looking into a mirror that reflects our naked emotions.
Dylan Foley is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.
Chris Lehmann
Rick Moody's fiction...admirably evokes the grace concealed within petty routines, the forgiveness entwined around deep family recriminations and the generosity of spirit detectable within our facile and feeling-challenged age...— Washington Post
Philadelphia City Paper
[Moody] writes eloquently and perceptively....Rocky Mountain News
...displays Moody's uncanny ability to perforate the surface of the seemingly ordinary lives of his characters. In doing so, he creates extraordinary work...Atlanta Journal Constitution
Moody's sentences can go on for pages...fortunately, the scene at the top of the stairs is usually worth the climb...Onion
A writer of tremendous virtuosity...Minneapolis Star Tribune
Part of the charm of his fiction is his willingness to experiment, to play with life and language...Washington Post
...admirably evokes the grace concealed within petty routines...and the generosity of spirit detectable within our facile and feeling-challenged age.Boston Sunday Herald
...further scrutiny reveals [Moody's words] are also as wll-chosen as the syllables in a sonnet...Janet Maslin
[Moody] animates this eccentric group of experiments with glimpses of a soulfulness behind the game-playing (the first story begins with the sight of a man in a chicken mask) and with a streak of gratifyingly acerbic wit.— New York Times
From The Critics
In such '90s novels as the much-lauded The Ice Storm and the even more ambitious Purple America, Moody explored a northeastern suburbia shaped by pharmaceutical numbness and post-punk rock. In his second collection of stories (The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven was the first), Moody is more concerned with narrative strategies, extending the possibilities of structure and voice. One story is like the liner notes to a box-set anthology, annotating a life through a selection of favorite records. Another is like an annotated catalog of rare books, examining what the fictional narrator calls "the pathology of book collectors" (while perhaps revealing more of that narrator's own pathology than he intends). Two other stories are each a single sentence long (one lasting two-and-a-half pages, the other sixteen). However uneven the results, the collection, which confounds the distinction between form and content, consistently challenges the reader to come to terms with what these stories mean. The best transcend literary gamesmanship, with both the opening "The Mansion on the Hill" and the closing title story dealing with a sister's death. The latter reads like autobiography (much in the manner of Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here") and both ring devastatingly true.—Don McLeese