How to make friends with demons

298 pages

English language

Published June 27, 2009 by Night Shade Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-59780-142-3
OCLC Number:: 226356170

No rating (1 review)

William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family - his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter's new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu - nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons! For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices. After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney's life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and …

William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family - his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter's new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu - nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons! For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices. After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney's life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and forgotten deceptions surface. Secrets threaten to become exposed. To weather the changes, William Heaney must learn one thing: how to make friends with demons!

1 edition

unicorndeburgh reviewed How to make friends with demons by Graham Joyce

Review of 'How to make friends with demons' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I can't recall why I added this to my To Read column, but I think it was because someone said that it resembles Jo Walton's "Among Others." It does, in the sense that narrator describes experiences that could be explained by either supernatural beings or mental illness. The first few pages were cynical and very funny, and I thought it was going to be lighthearted, but it is not. It often is funny. It has elements of a criminal caper story, and it has a bit of a middle-aged, middle class man having a midlife crisis. It also has hope and redemption. Not a book you can slot into a simple category.

Subjects

Demonology
Fiction