Rick Moody Demonology.
Little, Brown, 288 pages, $24.95

“Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find that he had been transformed into a cockroach” is no longer enough. What the thing needs is a corollary narrative about an estranged sister trying to escape the psychic scars left upon her by her suburban foster family. She dreams of cockroaches. Cockroaches infest her apartment and she squashes them. Critics would declaim: “Not since Lolita have we seen such a powerful metaphor for the collision of the Old World with the New.”

“Forecast from the Retail Desk,” a twenty-three-page story in Rick Moody’s new collection Demonology, takes as a protagonist a man who believes he can predict the future. He’s often wrong, but he is sometimes nearly right. Also in this story, a child has leukemia (we never meet the child, but the protagonist worries about him)....

 

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