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Amazon.co.uk Review
Rick Moody is a traditionalist. Despite his page-long paragraphs, brand-name dropping, obsessive cataloguing of workplace ritual, seemingly random italicising and inevitable digs at "multinational entertainment providers", Moody makes classically beautiful short stories. His tools are those of any master storyteller: detail, catharsis, the right word at the right moment. Granted, the details can be unexpected: 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 departed:
"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 fiancée. "Demonology" deals with the actual circumstances of her death. First we see her tucking the kids into bed prior to her fatal seizure: "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 woman: "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 and the reader will go along willingly. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Independent on Sunday, January 13, 2002
Here there is not just a whole but a whole that is totally coherent. It is absolutely more than the sum of its parts.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Dale Peck famously wrote that, 'Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.'1 Unlike Dale Peck, I'm not going to read his other books to find out. This collection is awful. Who told Moody he could write? How did he manage to get published? What's with all the italics?
This really is bad writing. I bought this after watching the film version of one of these stories - "The Mansion on the Hill." Not sure what the movie is called, but it stars Michelle Pfeifer. I thought that the film was a moving snapshot of the nature of grief - and here I can see where one of the above reviewers is coming from. The problem is that Moody can't write. He's got some nice ideas, but he's no writer. It's like he writes down any old stuff that comes into his head, with absolutely no regard for the story. His stories read like a writer's notebook, before drafting, before editing, when the writer is just splurging out random thoughts, or freewriting. Most writers would be embarrassed to let people even see this stuff, if it was part of their working journal. Moody publishes it. He's like an anti-craftsman. Think about everything Hemingway or Steinbeck does well. Now imagine the opposite. That's what Moody's prose looks like.
His books might be evidence of the truism that bad books sometimes make good movies. I enjoyed the Ice Storm too, but after reading this, I would rather spend an evening sitting alone in a darkened room that read another novel by Moody.
Dale Peck also wrote that"all of Moody's books [are] pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic.' I agree, and I've got nothing else to add.
1. The New Republic (online) [...]
This really is bad writing. I bought this after watching the film version of one of these stories - "The Mansion on the Hill." Not sure what the movie is called, but it stars Michelle Pfeifer. I thought that the film was a moving snapshot of the nature of grief - and here I can see where one of the above reviewers is coming from. The problem is that Moody can't write. He's got some nice ideas, but he's no writer. It's like he writes down any old stuff that comes into his head, with absolutely no regard for the story. His stories read like a writer's notebook, before drafting, before editing, when the writer is just splurging out random thoughts, or freewriting. Most writers would be embarrassed to let people even see this stuff, if it was part of their working journal. Moody publishes it. He's like an anti-craftsman. Think about everything Hemingway or Steinbeck does well. Now imagine the opposite. That's what Moody's prose looks like.
His books might be evidence of the truism that bad books sometimes make good movies. I enjoyed the Ice Storm too, but after reading this, I would rather spend an evening sitting alone in a darkened room that read another novel by Moody.
Dale Peck also wrote that"all of Moody's books [are] pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic.' I agree, and I've got nothing else to add.
1. The New Republic (online) [...]
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Rick Moody soars. His stories, much more than his loinger works, function perfectly: humour and loss struggle against each other like brothers. The last story, 'Demonology', is the most beautiful evocation of grief I have ever read. Rick: you're a true master.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
an astounding collection. Moody is the voice of a lost generation and, undisputably, the greatest American fiction writer of our time. the stories in Demonology offer a haunting yet oddly beautiful picture of American despair.
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