Rating: 
Summary: Overall a good read
Review: I really enjoyed The Chicken Mask. I think it was the strongest of the collection. I think this was a good, diverse collection and I would recommend to many of my friends.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the emotion.........feeling?
Review: I was really looking forward to reading these short stories by Rick Moody. There's been so much hype about this author's remarkable writing. I was deeply disappointed after reading this book. I almost stopped reading, after the first few stories, but struggled on to the very end, hoping the stories would get better or at least more interesting. Where is the emotion, feeling, and caring in these stories? In fact, there is too much added detail, skipping around, and confusion in most of these stories. The book's description states "full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language". Where? Did I miss something? The longest "short" story "The Carnival Tradition" was totally confusing. The title story and "Boys" were the two best stories in the entire collection.I gave this collection three stars because of the title story and a couple of others I felt were good. However, the rest were just a waste of my valuable reading time. I hope to spare you the trouble and will NOT recommend this one.
Rating:
Summary: Don't believe the hype ...
Review: I'm not saying Rick Moody is a bad writer. He can shift between social classes and write them all well. He has all the stylistic and linguistic pyrotechnics. He is intelligent, and is trying to deal with more than just ideas. But this collection lacks true emotional depth. Loss never transcends into grief, insecurity does not go to neurosis, love is never passion. It's small emotions that define this book, and I feel that the more experimental and language-intensive the work is, the more emotional substance needs to be there to support the structure. It's as if he has the same candy coating as Eggers and Wallace, but without the chewy center of hard-to-handle truth. I liked enough of the style to keep an eye out for future work, but can't recommend this collection as anything outstanding.
Rating: 
Summary: Save Your Money
Review: I've never been a fan of Rick Moody. I find his work pretentious and without emotion and this collection of short stories was no different. Definitely over-rated.
Rating: 
Summary: Unthreatening but pandering
Review: It's easy to understand Moody's appeal. His short fiction offers facile experimentalism with a commercial gloss. His idea of innovation is to go a little crazy with italics in unexpected places. Readers feel flattered, unthreatened. Moody is a "safe" writer--he'll never take you any place that might unsettle you. The occasional comparisons to Cheever and Updike are especially troubling, because as a stylist Moody has few discernible gifts other than the colloquial crispness one associates with overexcited magazine features. Moody is not a major writer. That he is mistaken for one, and promoted as one, and accepted as one, says a lot about the decline of literary fiction in this country.
Rating:
Summary: Decent Collection of Stories
Review: Like any short story collection, many of the stories I couldn't put down, others didn't capture my interest as well. I will first comment on my two favorties: "The Mansion on the Hill" and "Boys." "The Mansion on the Hill" was a great story with unexpected turns from beginning to end (like the car on the winding road). I liked all the characters and I still wanted to know what happened to them after the end of the story (I wanted to see the narrator's wedding). "Boys" was a wonderful short piece. You can feel the sentimentality of two boys in a household. It is sweet, short and full of emotional baggage, I loved it. These stories are both worth reading and I won't give away any details because that would spoil it for those who haven't read Demonology. Other worthy mentions are "The Double Zero" or "Demonology" not as great as the previous two I bragged about but also good stories. I actually know people in Ohio like the characters in "The Double Zero" and it was almost too familiar. With some of the stories I had trouble adjusting to the voice of the narrators. They were like scrambled, neurotic thoughts until Moody finally found a focus or nitch for the story. I wasn't crazy about any of the stories involving Gerry and his girlfriend except for the second part of "The Carnival Tradition". That one had the most substance. My absolute LEAST favorite line in these stories is in the first part of "The Carnival Tradition" when the angelic hispanic boy from the "known drug location" is yelling "It's your town now,...Your town." I thought that was very lame since the scene itself was already a very obvious metaphor for several things going on in the story. Stories like "Drawer" and "Forecast from the Retail Desk" were, for me, completely forgettable as well. However, I gave this an overall rating of four stars because the stories I did like made for an overall good read. It is a group of short stories and I'm aware that sometimes they are placed together because they all have a similar theme or some kind of connection to each other, even if the reader does not recognize this. Also, even the best writers don't always create literary masterpieces. Rick Moody is definitely a talented writer and I'm sure will come up with many more wonderful stories. If you would like another decent collection of short stories, pick up Bonnie Jo Campbell's Women and Other Animals.
Rating:
Summary: An in-betweener
Review: Moody's an unusual case. He's too smart and too talented to be considered a writer of popular schlock, but he's not smart enough or talented enough to be taken seriously as a literary writer. His work is easy to read and is an agreeable way to kill some time, but there's virtually no depth to what he writes, and in this book in particular there's a lot of sloppy writing. This book would have benefited from the handiwork of a caring editor. Moody is an obvious example of a writer spreading himself way too thin. He continues to write in the manner of an up-and-coming writer in his early twenties--there's no sign of maturing in his work. This book is pretty much for his fans; it's not likely to convert anyone.
Rating:
Summary: "Demonology" an exercise in fluff
Review: Of Rick Moody's books, I've read "The Ice Storm" and "Garden State." I liked both of them, although I prefer the film version of "The Ice Storm" to the novel. So I picked up a paperback copy of "Demonology," thinking that it would be equally engaging. I was wrong. I couldn't make it past the first few stories, they were all very thin and flat, and as I was reading, I couldn't help but think, "Who cares?" The first story, "The Mansion on the Hill," was unbelievably slow and tedious to get through, the same was true as I gave him another chance and started reading the subsequent stories, hoping in vain that things would get better. A real disappointment. I would drift off as I was reading, and could have skipped pages and still known what was going on in the plot. A very empty, unsatisfying read. Like expecting a steak dinner and only getting a rice cake.
Rating:
Summary: "Demonology" an exercise in fluff
Review: Of Rick Moody's books, I've read "The Ice Storm" and "Garden State." I liked both of them, although I prefer the film version of "The Ice Storm" to the novel. So I picked up a paperback copy of "Demonology," thinking that it would be equally engaging. I was wrong. I couldn't make it past the first few stories, they were all very thin and flat, and as I was reading, I couldn't help but think, "Who cares?" The first story, "The Mansion on the Hill," was unbelievably slow and tedious to get through, the same was true as I gave him another chance and started reading the subsequent stories, hoping in vain that things would get better. A real disappointment. I would drift off as I was reading, and could have skipped pages and still known what was going on in the plot. A very empty, unsatisfying read. Like expecting a steak dinner and only getting a rice cake.
Rating: 
Summary: Congratulations, Mr. Moody!
Review: Of the novels I've read in my life, I must say that this latest collection of stories by Mr. Moody is perhaps the best. Notice the package of Smarties-brand candy on the cover of the book; a quirky touch, eh? The whole book is like that. Delicious and quirky, with a nostalgia for the things we gobbled greedily as children. Pick up the book in your local bookstore, the small corner bookshop like the one in "You've Got Mail," the movie that starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (but, of course, buy the book at Amazon, because they offer significant savings, up to 30% off). Feel the book's soft, delicious heft. Feel the way, when you flip through the pages, you get the sense that the pages have little pillows of air between them, lending the book a luxurious feel. Mr. Moody's words are that way: luxuriant. They defy genre. Mr. Moody, an Ivy-educated writer, is not a genre writer. Genre writers tend not to be as well-educated, if I'm not mistaken. One thing you notice about these stories is that Rick Moody has chosen each word carefully. Each word means something. That's not really the case in less sophisticated, genre writing like John Grisham's (that's just my opinion; I don't mean to offend fans of genre writing). This is serious stuff: literary fiction. Rick Moody has put a lot of work into this book, that much is obvious. Each page has been carefully considered, with only the best pages making the final cut. I suspect Rick Moody declined a number of social invitations, from friends who admire him and are pleased that he considers them friends, in order to massage these pages into just the right form. You might say, after reading this book, that Rick Moody "has the write stuff." If you're turned off by "difficult" writing, this isn't the book for you. This volume is for ambitious readers, people who have already read a number of books. As a sign of how difficult this book is, Rick Moody, in the NYT the other day, is quoted quoting Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst notorious for his forbidding seminars. French writers tend to think difficult things; and they phrase them in ways that are difficult for most Americans to understand. But there is heady stuff in "Demonology," and really only one reference that would do if Rick Moody was to really capture the experience of writing this book, and that was a citation of Jacques Lacan. I noticed, on the thick, luxuriant dust-jacket of this book, that Mr. Moody had switched from the author's photo in which he is depicted with longish curly hair and funky glasses, to a more casual photo, in which he looks wealthier and more carefree than he did in his last author's photo. To be sure, he still looks competitive, like he'd be up for a game of touch football on a big, grassy lawn; but he looks less driven, less vision-impaired than the avant-garde writer he once was, back when he was writing other books that were just as edgy but less assured. This new photo projects greater comfort with his status--he's sure of himself now--and he can be cruel when necessary. In other words, Mr. Moody looks Kennedyesque in this latest photo. I bet there's a story behind that; I can imagine Mr. Moody saying to his agent, "I am tired of just being a pretty, funky face, looking like an East Village poet-slash-action painter. I want to look rich, tousled, as if I am on a yacht. Let's just get down to brass tacks: I want to look like Bobby Kennedy!" I admire both Bobby Kennedy and Rick Moody; there are a lot of similarities between them. Both, for instance, spent/spend a lot of time on the East Coast, and attended the best schools. Both have a certain edge about them, but are still very admirable. Yet they remain complex, enigmatic. There is a recent review in the NYT of this book, in which a fellow named Walter Kirn, who writes similarly "edgy" books, points out that short stories have traditionally been the "R&D department" of fiction -- that is, research and development, where white coats are worn, new ideas are tried out, brains storm, and prototypes are rendered. That was a brilliant image, a pretty cool insight that got me thinking. Walter Kirn proves, with that review, that he is as blithe and assured as Rick Moody. I bet Rick Moody has never met Walter Kirn, and I bet he will never thank Walter Kirn, in person or over the phone, for that review. I guess I want to close this review by saying that I think Rick Moody has given us a gift with this new book: he has shown us that fiction writers need not be shallow, simple, unsophisticated people. They can be complex, too, with different moods and different aspects, each of which is worth celebrating. They can grow. And sometimes, in addition to writing a book that reflects, quite elegantly, those changes, a new author's photo is required as well, on the dustjacket. Highly recommended.
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