's Best of 2001
Rick Moody is a traditionalist. Despite his page-long paragraphs, brand-name dropping, obsessive cataloguing of workplace ritual, seemingly random italicizing, 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 fiancé. "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. We'll go along willingly. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
Sending wry, heartbroken characters across the slightly tilted landscapes of his fiction, Moody fosters a low-grade bemusement in the 13 stories collected here. "The Mansion on the Hill," the first and perhaps the best, follows the adventures of narrator Andrew Wakefield as he tries to come to terms with his sister's deathAshe was killed in a car accident just before her wedding. Coincidentally finding himself employed at a ritzy wedding-planning business, Andrew alternates memories of the past with clunky product-speak descriptions of his job. The death of a sister is the theme of the title story, too, a tale Moody confesses at the end is hardly fictional at all, echoing in his fervent first-person declarations the nonfiction stylings of Dave Eggers. First published in McSweeney's, "The Double Zero," another of Moody's stories, describes the humorous failure of a family ostrich ranch. In "Carousel," an aging, low-level Hollywood actress muses on the metaphysics of the movie business and ends up stuck in the middle of a drive-by shooting while waiting at McDonald's to buy orange juice for her daughter ("So why are they here? According to what rationale? Do they even have juice at McDonald's?"). Moody's self-conscious prose strains for hyper-modern colloquial detachment, but too often misses its mark, clanging just off-key. (Jan. 25) Forecast: Fans of Moody's novels and previous short story collection (The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) will rush to flip through this uneven volume. Whether they will stick around to buy or to read all the way through remains to be seen, but the planned 9-city author tour will help. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A new collection from the author of The Ice Storm, the basis of the Ang Lee film, and prize winners like Garden State. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Washington Post, 1/22/01
"...admirably evokes the grace concealed within petty routines...and the generosity of spirit detectable within our facile and feeling-challenged age."


From Booklist
Moody, who received widespread acclaim for his 1994 novel The Ice Storm, subsequently adapted into a film by director Ang Lee, displays his skills as a writer of intricate, finely woven, and often humorous fiction in this collection of short stories. The stories have been previously published in national periodicals, including Esquire, the New Yorker, Elle, and several literary journals, and all are testimonials to his nuanced, subtly ironic modern style. Moody is at his best imagining the outsider. These characters, alternately men and women, often find themselves alone amongst a throng of decadent, conceited, would-be sophisticates. In "The Carnival Tradition, " Gerry, the lone Jew in a Halloween party full of dipsomaniacal debutantes, watches the fete spin out of control. In "The Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal," the cleverest piece in the collection, a woman struggles to cut through her boyfriend's Freudian literary theory lingo to confront him about their relationship. The title piece is an unexpected requiem for the hero's sister. Demonology is a fine introduction to one of the better writers working today. Ted Leventhal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Boston Sunday Herald, 1/21/01
"...further scrutiny reveals [Moody's words] are also as wll-chosen as the syllables in a sonnet..."


Rocky Mountain News, 2/11/01
"...displays Moody's uncanny ability to perforate the surface of the seemingly ordinary lives of his characters... Extraordinary work..."


Atlanta Journal Constitution, 2/2/01
"Moody's sentences can go on for pages...fortunately, the scene at the top of the stairs is usually worth the climb..."


The Onion, vol. 37, num. 03
"A writer of tremendous virtuosity..."


Minneapolis Star Tribune, 1/28/01
"Part of the charm of his fiction is his willingness to experiment, to play with life and language..."


Philadelphia City Paper, 3/15/01
"[Moody] writes eloquently and perceptively...."


Book Description
Rick Moody's stories have received astonishing praise that confirms his stature as one of the most important young writers at work today. Writing in Harpers, Vince Passaro named Moody as one of a handful of writers who have presented us with some of the best and formally most innovative short fiction in our literature. The publication of Demonology will expand Moody's admiring audience and further cement his place in American letters.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Among the swirl of ethnic weddings at a marriage mill in Connecticut, grief-stricken employee Andrew Wakefield plans an evil revenge against his dead sister's fiancé that involves a chicken mask and human ashes. Andrew, the central character in "The Mansion on the Hill," is just one of the many offbeat and troubled characters who populate Demonology, the second short story collection by Rick Moody, the author of the acclaimed novels The Ice Storm and Purple America. In this brilliant, satirical collection framed by the deaths of two sisters, Moody uses his acerbic wit and perceptive eye to address our futile attempts to find meaning and catharsis in our suffering.

Moody's stories navigate long, winding roads over which the author capably propels his readers toward certain intended epiphanies. In "The Carnival Tradition," he plays with the chronology of two aspiring bohemians in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1985, then brings them back to when they met as teenagers ten years earlier on Halloween. What begins as a send-up of scrambling and pretentious artists evolves into a comedy of manners about rich and awkward adolescents, finally becoming a devastating meditation on the loss of love and the death of youthful dreams. The story's maimed protagonist is left alone and isolated.

Moody further displays his penchant for breaking short story conventions when he uses a newly discovered cassette collection to tell of the downward spiral of an upper-class ne'er-do-well. In "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set," notes on the cassette tapes record the rock hits through the 1970s and '80s, as well as the young scion's inability to hold down jobs, stay out of drug rehab, stay in graduate programs, or to develop a meaningful life.

In "Surplus Value Books, Catalogue #13," Moody re-creates the book list of a mentally ill man selling his library. Each title he is selling refers in some way to his obsession with a female graduate student he will never kiss. As the list goes on, the increasing book values and outrageous liner notes become a vehicle for expression of the madman's hysteria.

In the title story, which ends the collection, Moody weaves a compelling ode to a sister who dies suddenly. With the orange flames of Halloween licking the edges of the story, Moody chronicles the sister's difficult but not entirely meaningless life while she takes her kids trick-or-treating. The grief of the narrator is unflinching.

Moody is on firmest ground in Demonology when he takes apart life in suburban America and examines the pieces with his biting humor. His mockeries of social conventions illuminate the raw human feelings of hurt and loneliness in his characters. Demonology proves once again that Moody is a master storyteller who weaves elaborate tales, bringing readers right where the writer wants us: looking into a mirror that reflects our naked emotions.

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In paperback at last: the exuberantly praised collection of short fiction-welcomed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review-that has firmly established Rick Moody as one of the leading literary voices of his generation.

Author Biography: Rick Moody is the author of three novels as well as one previous collection of short fiction. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to The New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Grand Street, Details, and The New York Times. He lives in New York.

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post

...admirably evokes the grace concealed within petty routines...and the generosity of spirit detectable within our facile and feeling-challenged age.

Onion

A writer of tremendous virtuosity...

Rocky Mountain News

...displays Moody's uncanny ability to perforate the surface of the seemingly ordinary lives of his characters. In doing so, he creates extraordinary work...

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Part of the charm of his fiction is his willingness to experiment, to play with life and language...

Boston Sunday Herald