How to Make Friends with Demons [Paperback]

William Heaney committed an occult transgression in his youth which has been plaguing him for 20 years. He is a very flawed person who despite trying to do his best is his own worst enemy. Heaney deals with the fact that he sees demons by trying to do good in a Robin Hood style with his not so merry band of book forgers. The dialogue is the strongest part of the book with many witty and honest lines.

The demon factor barely comes in and neither the British or American titles seem entirely apt because of it. The story had its slow parts and had little semblance of a plot for the first half, which I found disconcerting as the main character is seemingly traipsing about, but that is only because this isn't treated as your normal modern day Fantasy with a mission in mind from the start as it is more of a general lit story that could fine a home in many bookshelves next to the likes of Nick Hornby. It is all about character growth and human interaction. That said the occult underpinnings are there and very realistic in their approach and tact.

If you have friends who always say Fantasy isn't for them this could act as a good bridge book between more standard Fiction and genre. If you are expecting something Epic look elsewhere, but for an interesting character driven tour of London with some very flawed characters this is definitely worth checking out. The look into book forging was also quite intriguing.

How to Make Friends With Demons was published as Memoirs of a Master Forger in the UK where it also won the British Fantasy Award.

Reviewing Graham Joyce for fantasy readers can be tricky, because his novels are often firmly set in our contemporary reality, with only minor fantasy elements. In addition, those fantasy elements are often only visible to the narrator of the novel, creating the impression that they may be figments of the narrator's imagination. Regardless of the fact that Graham Joyce has won a handful of British Fantasy Awards, you could label his books as magical realism, literary fiction, fantasy, or a mixture of all three. The author himself calls his style of writing "Old Peculiar," which is a perfectly fitting way to describe the atmosphere of novels such as The Tooth Fairy and Dark Sister.

How to Make Friends with Demons is another great example of Graham Joyce's distinctive style. Narrator William Heaney is a more or less regular middle-aged man: boring government job, divorced with two kids, likes seventies music, has a drinking problem. Oh, and he believes that there are 1,567 varieties of demons that can possess anyone at any time. Someone else claims to have identified 4 additional demons, but Heaney thinks he's just confusing demons with psychological conditions -- and then labels excessive footnoting as a demon a few sentences later.

Heaney as a main character is fascinating -- literate, self-deprecating, tortured by his past. He sells expertly crafted literary forgeries, only to donate all the proceeds to a struggling homeless shelter. The novel is told in his voice, which leads to lots of gently ironic prose and gorgeous word choices, frequently funny and always incisive:

"Despite the fact that I work for a youth organization, I'm not great at talking with teenagers, even my own. In fact, I'm useless at it: there, let it be said. They hit thirteen and they are swallowed up by the Valley of Demons for seven years. I do know that some people don't emerge until they are thirty-three-and-a-third, but most come out from the undergrowth clutching, by the time they are twenty, a shiny nugget of reasonableness."

(By the way, this novel was published in the UK as Memoirs of a Master Forger and under the pseudonym William Heaney -- the name of the main character. Reinforcing the impression that the novel has autobiographical elements: Graham Joyce worked for the same government organization Heaney runs in the novel.)

There is much to love in this novel: its plot is slowly and expertly revealed through a combination of looks at Heaney's present-day life and flashbacks to his college days. Even minor characters are drawn with such care and precision that I found myself thinking about them long after I finished reading. On one level you can simply read this book as an enjoyable contemporary fantasy, but there are deeper themes running through it that connect in surprising ways, some of which I only realized days after finishing the novel. Another aspect I enjoyed is its intimate and knowledgeable look at the city of London, especially its many pubs and taverns. Even though I have no idea if all (or any) of them are real, they were so beautifully described that I wanted to visit all of them.

It had been a while since I read an entire novel in one day, let alone one sitting, but this one was just impossible to put down. Only about 300 pages long, How to Make Friends with Demons is a beautiful novel that's simply over too soon. Recommended.

Really enjoyed this one. I'm not sure it is fairly characterized as fantasy (though I'm using the tag for want of anything else), but anyone who reads the more literary end of F&SF is likely to enjoy it. I think the review blurb got it entirely wrong. I'd call it an elegant, well plotted and very well written meditation on the nature of suffering and grace, of the sort that gives a prism or window on the rest of the world for days or weeks after one puts it down. Mileage varies of course. Even though the genre and format are very different, it reminds me more than a bit of RA MacAvoy on one hand, and the best of John Gardner on the other. Joyce thinks in, and keeps, the fictional dream in a way which I think requires great craft -- good enough craft to be mostly invisible and leave one changed for the ride.