SOURCE: “Moody Rips the Suburbs Again,” in Toronto Star, February 4, 2001, p. BK-03.

In the following review, Charbonneau offers a positive assessment of Demonology.

The narrator of one of the stories in American Rick Moody's Demonology argues that soft rock music is “like a perfumed glob of used toilet tissue or a sample of imitation American cheese food product or meatless chili.” The same could be said for too many books of fiction—all light prose and predictable story lines. Moody's fiction is anything but soft or light.

Moody's latest collection—he's written a previous collection and three novels, including The Ice Storm and Purple America—is no easy-to-swallow literature you can read semi-absentmindedly in the subway. He's a gutsy writer who likes to experiment with form and structure, and the result is often impressive.

“The Ineluctable Morality of the Vaginal,” for instance, is told in a single 17-page...