DEMONOLOGY
Rick Moody
Back Bay Books
Fiction
ISBN: 0316588741

Rick Moody is best known in the popular mind as the author of THE ICE STORM, which was made into a somewhat flawed, occasionally brilliant film a year or few ago. Moody, however, is more renowned in some circles for his short stories. He is somewhat difficult to get a stylistic handle on, and while this can be occasionally maddening, it is also quite interesting. One never knows what to expect from Moody; he can be outrageous, funny, sorrowful, depressed, or...moody.

DEMONOLOGY is a collection of 13 of Moody's short stories (although "The Carnival Tradition" is more accurately classified as a novella) that run the gamut of styles, topics, and quality. Take "The Double Zero," the story of a man's mental and vocational breakdown in Bidwell, Ohio. The story is told through the eyes of the son of a man who, after losing a decent factory job and embarking on a series of failed financial ventures, opens a diner near a railroad station. There are no big surprises here; you know that the guy is gonna get squashed like a bug. The suspense is in how it happens. What is also interesting here, as a parenthetical, is that not only does Bidwell, Ohio exist, but also that Moody nails the town (described by its own residents as a whistle stop) perfectly. And that talent extends to Moody's descriptions of different individuals as types. Whether he is writing about a wedding planning service ("Mansion on the Hill") or an almost-successful actress on the downside of a nonexistent career ("Carousel") or a couple whose relationship flounders on the shores of sexual politics ("Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal"), Moody nails his protagonists dead-on.

Moody also is not afraid to experiment with the structure of the short story. "Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13" is...well, basically, it is a collection of descriptions and prices of various books (almost all are almost fictitious) that ultimately say more about the collector than they do about the books. There is also the absolutely brilliant "Wilkie Ridgeway Fahnstock, The Boxed Set." The story is a set of liner notes for a cassette collection, commercially produced and offered for sale, of a schlemiel who has reached penultimate failure in early adulthood and has nowhere to go. The selections offered on the cassettes are real songs, and taken together are the perfect hipper-than-you'll-ever-be overview of the revealed and hidden history of rock music from the '60s to the '90s. Impressive. "Boys," meanwhile, follows the lives of twin brothers as they achieve and experience the milestones of life over the course of sentences, paragraphs, a few pages. Moody, however, occasionally needs to rein in his tendency to be cute; "Pan's Fair Thong" is ultimately little more than an elegant time-waster, while "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal" is narrated as a single, 16-page sentence, which is ultimately a stylistic distraction from an interesting story.

If there is one unifying theme to the stories in DEMONOLOGY it is the loss of family members. The impetus behind the actions of the protagonist in "Mansion on the Hill" is his deceased sister; the presence of a deceased wife and mother hangs over a neighborhood party during "Hawaiian Night;" a dying boy is the cornerstone of the uneasy reunion between two estranged brothers in "The Double Zero." Though humor is interlaced throughout Moody's narrative, one is almost afraid to laugh, or even chuckle; the humor is liable to die in the next sentence. His work is certainly representative of life, if one regards life as a series of small victories brought low, suddenly and irrevocably, by tragedy.

It will be interesting to see where Moody's work takes him in the future. His world view is somewhat reminiscent of Leonard Cohen's prose work (though Cohen's humor, particularly in BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, is much sharper). Whether Moody will continue to push the narrative form constrictions of the short story or will present his well-honed observations in a more traditional fashion remains to be seen.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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