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A Pack of Smarties for the SalingerMoody, 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.
Do You like book Demonology: Stories (2002)?
Like others, I'm guessing, I arrived at this collection because of the oft-anthologized title story, which is fantastic and poignant and beautiful and true. The rest of the stories were written with an engaging narrative voice and inventive form, but most felt gimmicky. I learned after the first couple that there would always be a punchline, so if the story was long, like "The Carnival Tradition," it wasn't worth the protracted wait to arrive at the "hah" moment. Most of these were one-timers, with the exception of "Demonology" and "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal," the latter of which I'd read again for the fun way it mocked academic theory. Some other reviewers said that this collection turned them off from short stories altogether (should any book have that kind of power?). While I did sometimes wonder why certain stories had been published in top-tier magazines, I did always admire the mind at work behind the scenes. The gimmickry I mentioned previously put a cheap veneer on otherwise real emotions and deep characters when more stories with the raw nuance of "Demonology" could have made better use of Moody's very real gifts.
—N
FYI: Ebert himself hates the star ratings, and frequently complains about being forced to use them, but his editors won't let him drop the stars.He dislikes the thumbs-up/down thing too. Basically, his life is a series of hellish compromises, none of which make him happy.
—Mike Ingram
My first Rick Moody book but I left this collection of short stories with mixed feelings and with some unfinished too. Moody can capture different voices well but sometimes it becomes a little too arch for my taste. There are some good ideas but at times style wins out over content: liner notes for a decade-spanning box-set soundtrack to a life was a clever format but I found the story neither engaging or illuminating. And overall I was in the mood for concise, potent and even cryptic tales; and this curate's egg selection felt too prolix and indulgent to meet that need. If unmoved By Demonology, I do want to try his novels at some point.
—Deaddad
