Demonology

January 1, 2001
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 death--she 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.

September 15, 2000
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 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2000
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)