Title story's in my top three. Read it like a billion times. No s man, no s. (The other stories are ok.)

Like all of Moody's worst writing, these are more concept than story, which makes for flat, impersonal reading. Sort of like all the "art" that ArtForum covers these days, but rendered in word.

I was very divided on this book. On the one hand some stories were great, such as "Mansion on the Hill", "Boys" and "Demonology." These shorts didn't drag on and the narrative never seemed forced. It was easy to care about the characters involved, and they all seemed like real people that could have jumped off the page.Others, however, were oddly wordy and formal for the subject matter. I'm not a fan of using obscure, formal wording when the same could be said normally.Difficult to get through t...

His use of italics gets really annoying after awhile. In an interview he said it was one of the hallmarks of his style, although he didn’t say why he did it. It must mean something to him, but I have to say that most of the time (the only exception being when he uses it to indicate dialogue) I don't see what that emphasis accomplishes for him, especially when he overuses it so much. Not sure, but—with the possible exception of the novellas—I don't think there's a single story in this collection

Oh man, I HATED this book. In this short story collection, Rick Moody artfully applies all of the worst elements of fiction to create saccharine, predictable stories about character that are flat and unsympathetic. I was thrilled when bad stuff happened to them. This is one book I didn't even bother to finish - I got through the 100+ story right in the middle and then threw the book across the room, resolving to flip this guy off if I ever meet him. I think Rick Moody has singlehandedly soured m...

I feel I was meant to read this book because of two coincidences: One, I had just finished Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and had no idea about the connection between the two authors when I began the book. (Eggers is even thanked by Moody at the end of the book.) Two, I was eating a bowl of lentil soup when I read the sentence in "The Carnival Tradition" about the girl buying lentil soup. I don't take these things lightly.I checked out this book because it was referenced in t...

Fucking terrible. And I thought Chuck Palahniuk was a bad writer. Sorry, dude.

I picked this up on impulse from the library's shelves because Dale Peck savaged it. (And also because it was there, which it wasn't like a month ago. I heart you, English language collections guy.) I have no idea if it's any good, but I'm more than prepared to read it out of spite. Take that, Dale.________________________________________So, the shorter pieces are definitely uneven: I am much more into the experiments where he tries to shove one type of narrative into a different form (liner not...

I picked this up because I'd read the titular story in college and remembered liking it (then again, that was a decade ago). I also thought Moody's "The Diviners" was a solid novel. Just over 100 pages in, I made an executive decision to abandon "Demonology," because 1) it's like a bad edition of David Foster Wallace karaoke; 2) the stories I read mistook verbosity for depth; 3) I didn't give a damn about a single character or event; and 4) life is too short for bad books. Moody writes in a mad

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...

Finally finished this book and all I can say is it certainly brought out the demon in me, because I strongly disliked it.While some of the short stories were interesting, many of them were so jumbled and inconsistent that I was unable to make heads of tails of their purpose. Some of the ways in which the stories were written were interesting; for instance one story was written as a track list of songs through years and each list had a column to the left explaining why certain songs were chosen.

So it finally happened, I finally got hold of a book I just couldn't finish. I liked the first story, though I felt it was slightly dragged out, but the stories beyond that felt like watching a beautiful shade of paint dry. Or putting up pretty wall paper up. After nearly 85 pages I felt like I'd been punched by a baby like 100 times.

Pointless waste of time.

Rick Moody is an excellent writer. No doubt about that. I liked Garden State- The Ice Storm- and Purple America even though they were all gloomy. Which brings me to an important point about Rick Moody's writing: don't read it if you�re the slightest bit depressed because you'll be suicidal by the time you're finished. That's one of the problems I had with Demonology. I'd just lost my job- my grandmother died recently- my estranged father had a stroke and major heart surgery over the last few wee...

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I haven't always been a big a fan of short story collections. My main criticisms is that it's hard to form a coherence among the pieces. A short story is something that needs to be able to exist outside of a collection. When you gather a group of them together in a single book, it's like that first day of kindergarten class: some are going to mesh, some are going to clash and a scarce percentage are going to grow up to realize that they were conceived in the wrong time and use that as an excuse

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...

Let me say how happy I was to come across this collection while browsing at my local library. Both The Ice Storm & Garden State are on my Favorite Movie list, and I am a fan of short stories in general so I opened this book excited to delve into Mr. Moody's written word. Then it became what I like to refer to as adult homework, when I have to assign myself a number of pages or set amount of time to read and push myself to complete the book. Not because I have to, mind you, but because I wanted t...

Some books you read and they just stick with you always. This is one of those books. It serves as a representative sample of the worst excesses of postmodernism and snobbery. Demonology is a chronicle of pretentiousness, full of words and sentences constructed to look insightful but which have little, if any, real meaning. If you're interested in the lives of pathetic, prep school twits, this is your book. Want a deeper truth? Look somewhere else. To paraphrase movie critic Roger Ebert: "I hated...

Rick Moody has a very distinct writing style. He likes extremely lengthy sentences, and italics for no particular reason. This made these stories fairly exhausting to read. Some of them seemed worth this effort and some did not.