Demonology Stories

Rick Moody — 2002

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.

Reviews

Trever@kewlpinguino

Jul 2, 2022

Okay, so admittedly I read pieces of this for less than ten minutes, but I didn't want to read any more. Moody didn't give off a good vibe here. I feel like he was trying to write an imitation of Brief Interview With Hideous Men but failing at it. Moody tries to use DFW's style but he fails to capture the sense of disorder Wallace does. Basically, when DFW writes some long rambly sentence in, say, "The Depressed Person", there's a reason. It's almost free indirect speech except he always writes like that. Moody, on the other hand, uses a similar rambling, vocabulary-saturated style but without the reasoning behind it. I can't speak to the stories themselves, but I do know I don't like the feel I get of Moody here.

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Ana Ignat@anaaa

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Ron Bronson@ron

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Vivian Lin@vivianlin