Daemonomania

Rating:
Summary: Zeno's Paradox
Review: I waited 7 years for this book. This wait heightened expectation. Like his other 2 books of of Aegypt series it is incredibly well written and a pleasure to read. But with each volume it seems to get closer to a resolution but only by 1/2, as in Zeno's Paradox. Will we ever arrive? That some of the plot moves toward climactic scenes that never get fully developed was a disappointment...I can't help but feel that if we had all the pieces as one novel I would feel that this is one great story. I hope he does write the final part before He or I die or go blind. I hope it is less than 7 years and that I will remember to not expect so much and just enjoy the story, which is still a great read.

Rating:
Summary: Prosaicomania
Review: John Crowley is surely a writer's writer - that is, he would rather impress other writers with his craft than engage readers with exciting plotlines or empathetic characters. I have nothing against other reviewers who are amazed by Crowley's intricate layering of philosophies and his mastery of language, but I consider it all self-indulgent, pretentious, and boring. There is certainly a plethora of intriguing wordplay here, representing twisted realities and time unstuck, but Crowley also frequently overdoes it (badly) with annoying slush like "Where he had once. The sunporch where." Exploring the depths of prose can only get you so far with readers who don't feel like taking months to read a book slowly to soak in all the words, especially when the plot ultimately fails to secure one's attention for any extended amount of time.

The basic premise of this novel is wonderfully intriguing, featuring different ends of the world for different observers, with occult mysticism and medieval philosophy getting warped into diverging time streams and realities in the present. However, this book's jacket makes no mention that it is a continuation of some of Crowley's previous books, so the unfamiliar reader is confronted with ideas that are already in progress with inadequate explanations. Crowley doesn't even bother to wrap up all the story's possibilities in this book (or the previous installments). A heavily anti-climactic conclusion, which deals more with developments in the philosophy rather than the plot or the characters, promises nothing except yet another continuation into the next book that might come out someday whenever Crowley gets around to it. Fans of long-winded and pretentious literary contortions are surely waiting with bated breath, but the rest of us will have no trouble moving on to something else more readable. [~doomsdayer520~]

Rating:
Summary: Stylistic, philosophic, entertaining, highly recommended.
Review: John Crowley's newest book, Daemonomania is the third of a projected four-book cycle, the first two of which, Aegypt and Love and Sleep, aroused critical attention in their own right. This third work is somewhat dependent on the other two, as it continues the stories of Pierce Moffet, Rose Ryder, his lover, Rosie Rasmussen and her daughter and ex-husband. The intertwined stories of people who have retreated from modern civilization to a small community in the Catskills is, however, only part of Crowley's narrative. Their lives, littered with all the detritus of modern life, including childhood trauma, adult regrets, lost opportunities, family illnesses, neuroses and religions cults, make entertaining, affecting, and sometimes tragic reading. And Crowley is stylistically interesting, in fact, comparable, as I have done on occasion, to Umberto Eco, despite the fact that their ironies lie in different directions. In fact, Crowley's three titles to date compare in many useful ways to Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. This comparison is apt from a contentual perspective because they both use a mysterious book to connect the modern world to the late 16th and early 17th centuries in Austria, Britain and Italy, or more specifically, to the Rosicrucians and the early formulations of science as alchemy. Crowley's technique is to juxtapose narratives from the lives of well-known alchemists such s Giordano Bruno and John Dee, with those of his anti-hero Pierce, and the people whose lives surround his. Additionally, he uses emblems such as the book mentioned above, the unfinished work of Rosie Rasmussen's uncle's associate, Fellowes Kraft, and a mysteriously recovered cream-colored crystal to make the links seem more than literary. Pierce finds Fellowes Kraft's manuscript at a time when he is considering writing a similar story. Rosie's young daughter, Sam, is drawn to the crystal which seemed to have summoned demons for John Dee in the late 16th century Oxford workshops he shared with an Irishman, Kelly. We are left to decipher the actual connections between Sam and John Dee, Pierce and the Rosicrucians, and their little Catskills community and Oxford of the past. Crowley leads us to look for the fantastic in everyday life as if it was a hunger that centuries could not satisfy. Along the way, he provides a number of fascinating stories of people surviving the political, social and economic changes of the past and present and hints that we would do well to look to the epistemological changes of John Dee's era in an attempt to understand our own. Thus it is both the stylistic and philosophic that will draw readers to this book and to anticipate the production of the fourth, still to come.

Jan Bogstad, Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: Stylistic, philosophic, entertaining, highly recommended.
Review: John Crowley's newest book, Daemonomania is the third of a projected four-book cycle, the first two of which, Aegypt and Love and Sleep, aroused critical attention in their own right. This third work is somewhat dependent on the other two, as it continues the stories of Pierce Moffet, Rose Ryder, his lover, Rosie Rasmussen and her daughter and ex-husband. The intertwined stories of people who have retreated from modern civilization to a small community in the Catskills is, however, only part of Crowley's narrative. Their lives, littered with all the detritus of modern life, including childhood trauma, adult regrets, lost opportunities, family illnesses, neuroses and religions cults, make entertaining, affecting, and sometimes tragic reading. And Crowley is stylistically interesting, in fact, comparable, as I have done on occasion, to Umberto Eco, despite the fact that their ironies lie in different directions. In fact, Crowley's three titles to date compare in many useful ways to Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. This comparison is apt from a contentual perspective because they both use a mysterious book to connect the modern world to the late 16th and early 17th centuries in Austria, Britain and Italy, or more specifically, to the Rosicrucians and the early formulations of science as alchemy. Crowley's technique is to juxtapose narratives from the lives of well-known alchemists such s Giordano Bruno and John Dee, with those of his anti-hero Pierce, and the people whose lives surround his. Additionally, he uses emblems such as the book mentioned above, the unfinished work of Rosie Rasmussen's uncle's associate, Fellowes Kraft, and a mysteriously recovered cream-colored crystal to make the links seem more than literary. Pierce finds Fellowes Kraft's manuscript at a time when he is considering writing a similar story. Rosie's young daughter, Sam, is drawn to the crystal which seemed to have summoned demons for John Dee in the late 16th century Oxford workshops he shared with an Irishman, Kelly. We are left to decipher the actual connections between Sam and John Dee, Pierce and the Rosicrucians, and their little Catskills community and Oxford of the past. Crowley leads us to look for the fantastic in everyday life as if it was a hunger that centuries could not satisfy. Along the way, he provides a number of fascinating stories of people surviving the political, social and economic changes of the past and present and hints that we would do well to look to the epistemological changes of John Dee's era in an attempt to understand our own. Thus it is both the stylistic and philosophic that will draw readers to this book and to anticipate the production of the fourth, still to come.

Jan Bogstad, Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: Reviewers... bah!
Review: Of all the reviews I've read in the papers, only Elizabeth Hand seemed to "get" this book. Most of the rest seemed as if they had barely read it. Crowley is the author that authors read. Almost anyone who writes in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre is either influenced by, or could use a strong dose of, John Crowley. While this book is not an easy read, the effort required to adjust to his language yields amazing and moving rewards. Lovers of the occult, history, religion, and well-drawn characters would do well to read this series. One might be better served if one were to hunt down the initial books in this series, as well, but they're difficult to find.

Rating:
Summary: Another neglected Crowley masterwork
Review: The fact that Crowley's latest book has had zero impact on the general culture is a shame. In my local store there are two copies of the book for sale, both anonymously shelved into the SF ghetto. Many stores in New York carry no copies. THere have been maybe four reviews nationwide, the most prominent being in the Washington Post. It's as though it doesn't exist.

Perhaps the reception of this book will one day be equated with how Melville or Faulkner's novels floundered in the marketplace. Perhaps in 2075 or so, scholars and readers will be wholly bewildered. There was a new Crowley book out in 2000 -- and no one cared? It got remaindered within four months??? People thought Dave Eggers was the future of literature??

But enough conjecture. I still have hope that the common reader will discover this work and treasure it. And yes, Bantam has made a botch of the series. Having the first two volumes out of print makes a full comprehension of Daemonomania daunting for the newcomer.

Where Aegypt was vernal in all senses of the word -- a gleeful, open, exuberant work -- Daemonomania is a dimmuendo. There's a loss of heat, of possibilities. Lives and stories are wound down. There are ghosts everywhere, stuck at doors, wandering old houses. It's not a fun book, yes, and it may be the one I least return to of the (proposed) four, but it's perhaps the most essential of the quartet.

And the writing. Crowley is a prose genius: he makes the simple actions of a character determining whether to put diesel or regular fuel into his car a joy of writing. Its best scenes -- the Christmas masque, Dee and Bruno in Prague -- simply fantastic writing and even its minor characters, from Mal Cichy to Val the astrologer, are imbued with life.

A wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: Crowley keeps getting better
Review: To the reviewer who found the absense of favorable blurbs on the back cover of Daemonomania as telling of its quality: Since when do newly released hardcover editions ever carry blurbs of their own reviews? As for the reviews of Crowley's previous works, they did not appear until the release of the softcover editions. Look again at the hardcover of Love & Sleep: none of the reviews you mention are there. What are there, however, are blurbs from Peter Straub and Harold Bloom--special cases of advanced praise from fellow authors who had no doubt been with Love & Sleep while still a work-in-progress. Take note of the Bloom blurb on Daemonomania.

To readers new to Crowley or to Crowley readers who perhaps have not considered it before, when reading the reviews of disappointed readers of Love & Sleep and Daemonomania, you'll find that a great deal of their diappointment stems from the failure of those books as discreet novels. This failure is real, for, despite Bantam's insistance on marketing them as such, they aren't discreet novels. Nor are they sequels. They are continuations. Aegypt is the title of a four-part novel, of which Daemonomania is the third (the first of the four should actually go by the title, The Solitudes). Bantam, no doubt seeing the first continuation, Love & Sleep, as too much delayed to market it as such, probably compelled Crowley to add the perfunctory re-introductions to characters, places, and situations to get the new reader having never before read The Solitudes (i.e. AEgypt) up to speed. This is particularly necessary to Bantam now, since they haven't bothered this time to re-release The Solitudes or Love & Sleep in tandem with the release of Daemonomania. This failure, however, is Bantam's, not Crowley's. AEgypt was poorly marketed from the start, and the trend continues with Daemonomania. These books are neither fantasy nor magic realism: they are unique and highly imaginative and meditative works of literature that, all content asside, stand as great artistic works before which most all works of contemporary literature with any pretention to a lasting readership pale. Literary history will mark Crowley's present neglect as a sad curiosity, but his neglect will not and cannot last. Crowley's that good.

Rating:
Summary: Crowley and the Search for Meaning
Review: With "Daemonomania" John Crowley continues his ornate and multi-levelled search for Meaning in a world of shifting and competing narratives. His anti(que)-hero Pierce/Perceval/Parsifal attempts to come to terms with the complexities of his own nature and past , gradually coming to realise the need to "set out,set out" upon his Quest. A sprawling tapestry of allusion, allegory, and wordplay, "Daemonomania" has echoes of Eco's "The Name of the Rose" in its insistence on the attention and work of the reader.Certainly I feel that if Crowley were European and not labelled a Fantasist then Literary prizes would emblazon his covers. As it is, his writing is bedazzling Art which repays continual revisits.There is a heady joy in knowing that such books can still be written.

Rating:
Summary: Reinvigorates the Series
Review: With Daemonomania, Crowley has added the third and strongestnovel in the Aegypt series since the first volume. The Houses of the Zodiac through which this tale is carried are embdodied in the increasing melancholy and coldness that afflicts Pierce Moffett, his lover Rose Ryder who assumes a more specifically erotic role than anything yet written by Crowley, and Rosie and her daughter Samantha, whose seizures not only command the novel but command the reader's care. Characters dominate, as a Christian cult challenges Pierce's circle of friends and provides the most action in the story. The strongest narrative drive is provided in Crowley's recreation of the fall of John Dee and the burning of Bruno. But Dee's moleskin-colored globe is now in Sam's possession. Did she exist in that earlier age? The reader can hope that the next three Houses will direct Pierce and his friends towards another Spring in the final novel to come. Multi-layered, a novel that demands immediate re-reading, gorgeously languaged, this is Crowley again at his best.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment after a long, long wait
Review: Years ago I learned of Little, Big after reading a column in Twilight Zone magazine; I've never had a better reading experience since. I sought after all of Crowley's previous works and watched for new ones. Crowley is too good and too intelligent to ever try and repeat the incredible milestone that Little, Big represents, and I've haven't allowed myself to be disappointed by that. Aegypt and Love and Sleep promised a lot to come and I constantly searched for news of the next book in the series. But I would have to agree with one reviewer who essentially said that Crowley is a little too clever in Daemonomania. The book is incredibly dense, which doesn't imply anything negative, but I feel its density undermines some of the great reading satisfaction that plot can bring. I read half the book and put it down for several months, then returned and reread it front to back. I felt as though Crowley was constantly teasing me with the promise that something might happen, only to jerk away the lure right when I got close. It was so unsatisfying.I've rated Daemonomania 3 stars, but the work on this book is 5 star compared to 3/4 of the books being published today. However, compared to his other books, this one misses the mark. I don't see what is left for the final volume.