Practical Demonkeeping

Last updated

Practical Demonkeeping
Practicaldemon lg.jpg
First edition
Author Christopher Moore
LanguageEnglish
Genre Humor, fiction, absurdist, Horror, comic fantasy
Publisher St. Martin's Press
Publication date
Original Hardcover: January, 1992
Publication place United States
ISBN 0-312-07069-1 (Original Hardcover)
OCLC 62912461
Followed by Coyote Blue  

Practical Demonkeeping is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1992. [1] His first novel, it deals with a demon from Hell and his master. The novel has been translated and published in German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.

Contents

Plot summary

Travis was born in 1900, yet he has not aged since 1919, because he accidentally called up a demon from hell named Catch as his servant, presumably forever. Ever since then, Travis has been trying to get rid of Catch, but he is unable to do so because he has lost the repository of the necessary incantations. He traces their whereabouts to a fictional town called Pine Cove, along Big Sur coast, where he thinks the woman he gave them to may be residing. Interactions with the townspeople and with a djinn, who is pursuing Catch, create considerable complications.

Several characters from this novel continue their lives in later novels by Moore. Catch appears in a later book ( Lamb ), but a much earlier period of history; in addition, the setting of Pine Cove itself is revisited for The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove and The Stupidest Angel . The fictional town of Pine Cove is described as being within easy driving distance of San Luis Obispo, California.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews described Practical Demonkeeping as a "Good-natured, often funny, but excessively complicated tale", observing that "First-novelist Moore throws in more plot twists than the Pacific Coast highway has curves". [1]

Related Research Articles

<i>Catch-22</i> 1961 novel by Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is a satirical war novel by American author Joseph Heller. It is his debut novel. He began writing it in 1953; the novel was first published in 1961. Often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, it uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, describing events from the points of view of different characters. The separate storylines are out of sequence so the timeline develops along with the plot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Moore (author)</span> American writer

Christopher Moore is an American writer.

<i>The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove</i> 1999 novel by Christopher Moore

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1999. It is set in the same fictional town of Pine Cove, California, as his first novel, Practical Demonkeeping, and also brings back some of the same characters.

<i>Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christs Childhood Pal</i> 2002 novel by Christopher Moore

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 2002. In this work the author seeks to fill in the "lost" years of Jesus through the eyes of Jesus' childhood pal, "Levi bar Alphaeus who is called Biff".

<i>Something Happened</i> 1974 novel by Joseph Heller

Something Happened is Joseph Heller's second novel. Its main character and narrator is Bob Slocum, a businessman who engages in a stream of consciousness narrative about his job, his family, his childhood, his sexual escapades, and his own psyche. Although Something Happened failed to achieve the level of renown that Catch-22 did, it has since developed a cult following, with some considering it one of Heller's finest works.

Christopher Travis Rice is an American author. Rice made his fiction debut in 2000 with the bestselling A Density of Souls, going on to write many more novels, including The Snow Garden, The Heavens Rise, The Vines, as well as the Burning Girl series. His work spans multiple genres, including suspense, crime, supernatural thriller, and erotic romance. With his mother Anne Rice, he is the co-author of the historical horror novel Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra and its sequel, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris.

Chaplain Captain Albert Taylor Tappman is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 and its 1994 sequel Closing Time. In earlier editions he was called Chaplain Robert Oliver Shipman, but this was changed to Albert Taylor Tappman. Editions published in some other territories, notably Britain, have continued to use the original name. Heller named the character after Charles Allan Tapman, a Penn State University boxer and Class of 1938 graduate that Heller met socially in the early 1950s.

<i>The Stupidest Angel</i> 2004 novel by American writer Christopher Moore

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror is a 2004 novel by American writer Christopher Moore. Set during Christmas, it brings together several favored characters from his previous books set in the fictional town of Pine Cove, a recurring location in Moore's novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry D'Amour</span> Fictional character

Harry D'Amour is a fictional occult detective created by author, filmmaker, and artist Clive Barker. He originally appeared in the short story The Last Illusion in Books of Blood Volume 6, an anthology written by Barker and published in 1985. D'Amour has appeared in other Clive Barker prose stories, as well as comic books published by Boom! Studios, and the 1995 film Lord of Illusions wherein the character is portrayed by actor Scott Bakula. Following this, the comic book adaptation of Barker's novel The Great and Secret Show depicts D'Amour as resembling Bakula. In 2012, the cover for Hellraiser #18 used actor Thomas Jane as the model for D'Amour. In multiple stories, D'Amour is depicted as living in the same reality as Barker's popular creations the Cenobites and the Hell Priest.

<i>Coyote Blue</i> 1994 novel by Christopher Moore

Coyote Blue is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1994. It has been widely reviewed.

<i>Gilead</i> (novel) 2004 novel by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is a novel by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956. Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880. He said that he was seventy-six years old at the time of writing.

<i>Brothers</i> (Goldman novel) 1986 novel by William Goldman

Brothers is a thriller novel by William Goldman. It is the sequel to his 1974 novel Marathon Man and is Goldman's final novel.

<i>Demon in My View</i> Novel by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Demon in My View is a vampire novel written by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, and published on May 9, 2000. Originally entitled Bitter Life, it was published when the author was 16. It is the follow-up to In the Forests of the Night, which she wrote at the age of 13. The title refers Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "Alone", which appears in the beginning of the book.

<i>Cold Mountain</i> (novel) 1997 novel by Charles Frazier

Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical novel by Charles Frazier which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares several similarities with Homer's Odyssey, with the protagonist's circuitous and often derailed journey homeward as the central example. Nearly every chapter alternates between the stories of Inman and Ada, a minister's daughter recently relocated from Charleston to a farm in a rural mountain community near Cold Mountain, North Carolina, from which Inman hails. Though they knew each other only for a brief time before Inman departed for the war, it is largely the hope of seeing Ada again that drives Inman to desert the army and make the dangerous journey back to Cold Mountain. Details of their brief history together are told at intervals in flashback over the course of the novel.

<i>Lovelock</i> (novel) 1994 novel by Orson Scott Card and Kathryn H. Kidd

Lovelock is a 1994 science fiction novel by American writers Orson Scott Card and Kathryn H. Kidd. The novel's eponymous narrator, a sentient monkey, takes his name from James Lovelock, the scientist-inventor who formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which figures heavily in the book.

<i>Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man</i> 2000 novel by Joseph Heller

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man is a novel by American writer Joseph Heller, published posthumously in 2000. It is his seventh novel. His final work, it depicts an elderly author as he tries to write a novel that is as successful as his earlier work, mirroring Heller's own career after the success of Catch-22.

<i>John Dies at the End</i> Lovecraftian horror novel by Jason Pargin

John Dies at the End is a comic lovecraftian horror novel by Jason Pargin, under the pseudonym David Wong. It was first published online as a webserial beginning in 2001, then as an edited manuscript in 2004, and a printed paperback in 2007, published by Permuted Press. An estimated 70,000 people read the free online versions before they were removed in September 2008. Thomas Dunne Books published the story with additional material as a hardcover on September 29, 2009. The book was followed by three sequels, This Book Is Full of Spiders in 2012, What The Hell Did I Just Read in 2017, and If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe, in 2022. A film adaptation by Don Coscarelli was released in 2012.

<i>I Am Not a Serial Killer</i> 2009 horror novel by Dan Wells

I Am Not a Serial Killer is a 2009 horror novel written by American author Dan Wells, originally published by Tor Books. It is Wells' debut novel and the first installment in the John Cleaver series. It is followed by five books, and has been published in English, Spanish, French, German, and Russian.

<i>Ulysses Moore</i>

Ulysses Moore is a series of adventure books written by the Italian author Pierdomenico Baccalario. The plot of the series centers on the fictional village of Kilmore Cove and its Doors of Time. The book has been published by Scholastic Corporation, a New York-based publishing company.

<i>The Marrow Thieves</i> 2017 novel by Cherie Dimaline

The Marrow Thieves is a young adult dystopian novel by Métis Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline, published on September 1, 2017, by Cormorant Books through its Dancing Cat Books imprint.

References

  1. 1 2 "PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING". Kirkus Reviews . November 1, 1991. Retrieved December 24, 2024 via ProQuest.