drbird's review against another edition
5.0
after having read The Ice Storm and Garden State many moons ago (the late 90s), I had lost track of Rick Moody. Not that he went anywhere. I even have a copy of Purple America that I have never read. But I just never found myself drawn back to him. Recently I had to read Demonology for a class and also had the chance to meet Moody at a reading. I have fallen into his post-Ice Storm work with much enthusiasm. It doesn't always work ("Hawaiian Night" is conceptually interesting but almost too dense to figure out; "Wilkie Fahnstock" seems like one of those ideas that probably shouldn't have made it to the page), but when it does, I am enthralled ("Mansion on the Hill," "Forecast from the Retail Desk," "The Carnival Tradition," "Boys," and of course "Demonology."
He's definitely not for everyone -- and I don't mean that in a "I'm smart enough to get it" way. If you can get through the misfires, the ones that hit, hit hard.
He's definitely not for everyone -- and I don't mean that in a "I'm smart enough to get it" way. If you can get through the misfires, the ones that hit, hit hard.
lauren_endnotes's review against another edition
3.0
Moody makes classically beautiful short stories. His tools are those of any master storyteller: detail, catharsis, the right word at the right moment...
migrex's review against another edition
2.0
No doubt Rick Moody can write and he did have me running to the dictionary with his vocabulary. But his has this "annoying" use of "italics" (imagine the italics there) which got old pretty fast. None of these stories really spoke to me although I did think they were original. In particular, I liked the life story of the man written in the form of an album review or album liner notes, very original. All in all, though, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
kfan's review against another edition
5.0
5 stars for the title story, which is one of my all-time favorites, which when I read it was one of those life-changing things. I don't remember any of the other stories in this collection, but who cares.
missnicelady's review against another edition
2.0
I liked the first story a whole lot. I think I just wasn't in the mood for the others. Perhaps I'll try again some day.
jenniferlynnkrohn's review
2.0
Demonology is book where I like most of the individual elements, but found myself unable to connect with the whole. With the exception of the titular story (which I love), I finished each piece feeling that something was missing. Ultimately, I enjoyed Moody's mastery of voice and his willingness to experiment with the narrative form, but I just never connected with these stories.
anndouglas's review
4.0
A free-ranging collection of short stories that tries new and unexpected things with the short story form. Definitely a book for students of short fiction to study, but perhaps less likely to captivate someone who is reading for simple enjoyment.
The standout story in the collection is "Boys." The repetitive structure of the writing carries you forward until you reach the story's wrenching conclusion. Devastating.
The standout story in the collection is "Boys." The repetitive structure of the writing carries you forward until you reach the story's wrenching conclusion. Devastating.
zeftonresident's review
4.0
A Pack of Smarties for the Salinger
Moody, Rick. Demonology. Back Bay Books, Boston: 2001.
“The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis,” (3). This first line, the first sentence for “The Mansion on the Hill” the first story from Rick Moody’s short fiction collection Demonology, creates a tone that the rest of the book follows: madcap mourning. It’s the class clown, who, even after the death of a parent, still cracks a few jokes in the middle of a lecture.
Every story, ranging from the aforementioned “The Mansion on the Hill” to “Forecasts from the Retail Desk,” all have this undercurrent of intense sadness, of desperation to deal with the emotions that flow through the human mind in the worst of times, but presents them all with a veneer of the absurd. Taking another story, “On the Carousel,” deals with a woman in Los Angeles, someone in the television industry, driving her daughter to a McDonald’s for some juice. While floating around in her private fantasies of non-existent fame and waiting in the drive-thru, the side of her car becomes the stage for a gang shooting; a kid walks up and begins to open fire on a group the next parking lot over. The woman is in shock of the event and tries to bury her daughter as far as she can into the car’s floor, but the entire time the battle rages above, she only has a single train of thought: “It could be optioned—the story of the attractive professional woman caught in the crossfire at a local McDonald’s,” (61). This event will become, for her, the stepping stone into her screen-writing career, how one woman protects her child from vicious gang crimes in LA; her career blossoms in the back seat.
But this is just his normal fiction, the vanilla stuff that nearly any writer of short fiction—albeit not as well—could possibly craft in a few months. No, where Moody really gets lively is his more experimental pieces, pieces like “Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set” and “Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13.” The former tells the story of the titular Wilkie Fahnstock, a failure and utter despot in every facet of living, through the one thing that better reflects the human condition than nigh any force imaginable, through a series of mixtapes. The story is split into two columns: the right side contains the playlist while the left commentates on Wilkie’s life and times as the music rolls by. Then the former, a story that plays out in minor sentences among the sale listings for various rare books. It’s a piece about obsession, not about the books, but about the “beautiful young bibliographer of the greatest of expectations,” obsessing over Anna Feldman, a woman who has a restraining order against the unnamed bibliographer, (284). His infatuation piles into nearly every listing, talking more and more of Anna as the pages flip by.
In all honesty, this collection was a piece of liberation to me as a writer, I saw explicitly what a writer could do if they no longer cared about the formatting and just wanted to get a story out. The latter two stories I wrote about were just odd enough to grab the attention in such a way that a reader couldn’t help but go on, just out of curiosity, just to see where this thing would lead. I want nothing more than to be capable of that, to have something stand out in such a way that it draws the eyes in and lets them dance about the page at the oddity that unfolds.
Moody, Rick. Demonology. Back Bay Books, Boston: 2001.
“The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis,” (3). This first line, the first sentence for “The Mansion on the Hill” the first story from Rick Moody’s short fiction collection Demonology, creates a tone that the rest of the book follows: madcap mourning. It’s the class clown, who, even after the death of a parent, still cracks a few jokes in the middle of a lecture.
Every story, ranging from the aforementioned “The Mansion on the Hill” to “Forecasts from the Retail Desk,” all have this undercurrent of intense sadness, of desperation to deal with the emotions that flow through the human mind in the worst of times, but presents them all with a veneer of the absurd. Taking another story, “On the Carousel,” deals with a woman in Los Angeles, someone in the television industry, driving her daughter to a McDonald’s for some juice. While floating around in her private fantasies of non-existent fame and waiting in the drive-thru, the side of her car becomes the stage for a gang shooting; a kid walks up and begins to open fire on a group the next parking lot over. The woman is in shock of the event and tries to bury her daughter as far as she can into the car’s floor, but the entire time the battle rages above, she only has a single train of thought: “It could be optioned—the story of the attractive professional woman caught in the crossfire at a local McDonald’s,” (61). This event will become, for her, the stepping stone into her screen-writing career, how one woman protects her child from vicious gang crimes in LA; her career blossoms in the back seat.
But this is just his normal fiction, the vanilla stuff that nearly any writer of short fiction—albeit not as well—could possibly craft in a few months. No, where Moody really gets lively is his more experimental pieces, pieces like “Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set” and “Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13.” The former tells the story of the titular Wilkie Fahnstock, a failure and utter despot in every facet of living, through the one thing that better reflects the human condition than nigh any force imaginable, through a series of mixtapes. The story is split into two columns: the right side contains the playlist while the left commentates on Wilkie’s life and times as the music rolls by. Then the former, a story that plays out in minor sentences among the sale listings for various rare books. It’s a piece about obsession, not about the books, but about the “beautiful young bibliographer of the greatest of expectations,” obsessing over Anna Feldman, a woman who has a restraining order against the unnamed bibliographer, (284). His infatuation piles into nearly every listing, talking more and more of Anna as the pages flip by.
In all honesty, this collection was a piece of liberation to me as a writer, I saw explicitly what a writer could do if they no longer cared about the formatting and just wanted to get a story out. The latter two stories I wrote about were just odd enough to grab the attention in such a way that a reader couldn’t help but go on, just out of curiosity, just to see where this thing would lead. I want nothing more than to be capable of that, to have something stand out in such a way that it draws the eyes in and lets them dance about the page at the oddity that unfolds.
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