The Devil Is Dead

The Devil Is Dead Trilogy #2

by R.A. Lafferty

This tells of an astonishing band of adventurers seeking the Devil himself. It is a tale of demons and changelings, monsters and mermaids--and of how it is not always serious to die, the first time it happens.
The Devil is Dead Trilogy:
-Archipelago ('79): 1st book of trilogy. Manuscript Press, Lafayette, LA.
-The Devil is Dead ('71). Berkeley Hts/Gillette, NJ: '99 edition, Wildside Press; '71/77 ed, Gregg Press, Boston.
Interglossia: A portion omitted from printings published in How Many Miles to Babylon?, pp16-18, A Magazine of Popular Literature & Popular Culture 5, in '72 (ed. by Tom Collins, Fan Press, Lakemont, GA)
Apocryphal Passage of the Last Night of Count Finnegan on Galveston Island: The last chapter omitted from 1st edition because the publisher didn't receive it in time. Published in Episodes of the Argo
-More Than Melchisedech
Tales of Chicago
Tales of Midnight
Argo

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Novels, Speculative Fiction, Supernatural, Adventure

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1971

About the author

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.

Reviews

[Printable Tire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was greatly impressed by the Devil is Dead, the second book I have read by R.A. Lafferty. Lafferty is unidentifiable- this book is not at all science fiction, or fantasy even- it is more a myth and a dream, and a great farcical chart of cosmic conspiracies and Armageddon.

R.A. Lafferty is like Calvino, only funnier; he is like Pynchon, only less pretentious, or pretentious in a different way; he is like Brautigan, only more serious; he is like Vonnegut, but less cynical; his world is like a Robert Downey Sr. movie, only more arcane. I enjoy his digressions and lies, and this whole book could be considered one long digression of a story- he truly is a unique voice, and the most unknown great master of folktelling of the 20th century.

It was easier to read this book than Not to Mention Camels because in this case I knew what to (and not to) expect. You must suspend your idea of rational order, and allow things not to be explained, or if explained only so in a frustrating way. You must enjoy his subtle (and not so subtle) world games and understand in his world, everyone is a double for someone else. People don't talk like they do "in real life"- they talk almost operatic, sometimes as if they stepped out of Oscar Wilde's Salome- esoteric trivia, both real and false, is invented, vast conspiracies are unearthed, and an almost Scientology complex charts the fates of men. Lafferty's world is schizophrenic, and might turn one insane.

To enjoy R.A. Lafferty's world you must also enjoy passages like these:

"It was a little before the middle of March that Finnegan had a tailor make him a tuxedo with green lapels for St. Patrick's day. Then he began to celebrate.
'I am Finnegan the Irish crock,' he said when the logorrhea was upon him. 'One Finnegan is worth a dozen of those pirates. I am the salt of the earth. You do not toss the salt under a bushel. You put it in a saltcaster and set it on the table for the whole world to see. I am the only perfectly spherical saltcaster in the world; I am the grandfather of all the saltshakers; I am the cerulean saltcellar. Did you know that saltcellar is an anachronism?'
'An anachronism, dear?' Doll asked.
'That other thing, whatever it is, when you say the same thing twice. Cellar is saliere, from sal, salt. The word already has salt in it, so the salt in saltcellar is in excess, too damned much salt. 'If it be not salted with salt, it will be salted with sulphur' as the prophet says. You didn't know I was educated, did you, Doll?'
'It is a shock.'
'Ask me what you call a conic section when e is less than one. Ask me what is an Exterior Proletariat. Ask me about Elective Affinities and the Categorical Imperative. Go ahead, ask me.'
'With you it is two fingers of the stuff in the bottom of a glass. That is the imperative. The ice and the soda are the categorical.'
'Right, Doll, right. Ask me how many legs has an arachnid? What you call the cosine of the angle of lag between voltage and current in an AC circuit? What is the equator of a parabola? Ask me how you say 'I ordered cucumbers, I sure did not order that stuff' in Russian. A lot of people think I'm dumb just because I don't have any brains.'
'They aren't necessary, Finn dear. On you b rains would be grotesque. How much better to have that little trap door into your brain pan where you can lay the hidden quart and always have it handy. People with brains would never think of a thing like that; and even if they did they wouldn't have room for the bottle there.' (145-146)."

"One day, in the Ship, Finnegan asked her who her husband was.
'But you know him, dear,' she said. 'He's the cop with the little moustache named Tommy.'
'It's an odd name for a moustache,' said Finnegan.
'It is unusual,' said Le Marin who was there also. 'I knew an Englishman who had a moustache named Tankersley. I knew a Nigerian who called his Cecil. Myself, in my salad days, had one christened Pierre. But Tommy I had not heard.'
'No, I mean Tommy's name is Tommy, not the moustache's,' said Hildegarde.
'Well, what is the moustache's name?' Finnegan persisted.

'It doesn't have any name.'
'How old is it that it doesn't have any name?'
'About two years old. Oh, you guys are kidding.' (174-175)"

After Finnegan has subconsciously drawn a portrait of a particularly serious devil:

"'He's an old repeater,' said Van Ghi. 'He's in the background of many otherwise fine paintings. 'The Night Watch,' for instance. And Peter Bruegel did him often. He's in the 'Betrayal' of Giotto, and he's in the 'Burial' of Count Ortega. He was in a lot of El Grecos, often painted over, and nearly as often uncovered again. He has been painted out of many pictures for their betterment. He's on Notre Dame in stone. He's on Etruscan vases and Aztec statuettes. Let's burn him as the Father says. You had better paint without inspiration from now on, Finnegan. You have drawn the Joker instead of the Queen.' (195)."

R.A. Lafferty seems to want us to research his tales, to lead us down blind alleys like his novels. It is amazing in this the internet age that these wild goose chases and shaggy dog stories still hold up astoundingly well. I would love to read a very very long book by him.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

A night-dune imaginary: there was a world full of people with pumpkin-heads for heads, and candles burning inside. Then Seaworthy and the Devil and their spooky crew came along, lifted the top off each head, blew out the candles inside and put the tops back. The pumpkin-headed people seemed to get along about as well as before; yet there was a difference.

A man awakes into one of his lives, partway through conversation with a bum who may be a millionaire, as they wait for the bars to open, on the morning after they have buried someone who refuses to remain dead. A ship is outfitted, an obscure voyage undertaken. Events multiply without resolving. The nature of the world, maybe, is interrogated.

What is this? Not really a sci-fi story at all (though, as with Ice, pulp publishing can be a haven for secret masterpieces too weird and veiled in design for the usual literary engines. This is not a loss.) Rather, this might be (as often observed) a set of overlapping adventure yarns and shaggy dog stories spun out of alcoholic haze by a bunch of sailors and layabouts. Frivolous tall tales covered in mythologizing filigree, and rendered less frivolous by their recurring motifs of cyclic death and rebirth, doubles and fetches, fate and will. And all underwritten by a secret history of the human race in battle with either demonic forces, or its own prehistory and genetic dead-ends, or both, or both being the same anyway.

The entirety is also underwritten by certain uncertainty and subjectivity about the layers of reality here (universal reality in addition to narrative reality), something familiar to Phillip K Dick, as well, and which I gather is further expanded upon by the other parts that make up the supposed trilogy of which this is the centerpiece. Really, with the meta-story expansions of the trilogy and beyond -- the lost chapters (the final chapter was omitted from this printing because it supposedly arrived too late at the publisher(?!) but Lafferty might have viewed this as an advantage*, perhaps happenstance was not so happenstancial afterall), the omissions (apparently including a mysterious, omitted "interglossia" later published elsewhere), the variations (between editions, between stories, between published versions in various places), the general obscurity and unavailability of the whole body of work -- the implication is both that every story exists only in Calvino-esque multiplicity, and that to seek a single definitive narative reconstruction is entirely besides the point. Stories don't work like this, human experience doesn't work like this, the universe, even, does not work like this.

The experience of reading this novel is a unique one. For much of the book the fog of strangeness and narrative ambiguity kept me in a state of pure anticipation: where might this go? It was impossible to guess, each new detail added to a bridge into the pure nothingness of possibility. Then, a resolution and re-track. Initial disappointment: was I building a bridge to nowhere? Was all that mystery really just a screen for a fundamental lack of direction? Later, no: there are Things Going On Here. I just may never know what exactly. Like Carrington's The Stone Door, another favorite, a mythic weight emerges from the half-sketched narrative.

And here's the amazing first edition cover of my copy:



*"It is the first and the last sheepskins that are always
lost or worn. There is no story that is not improved by having its first and last pages lost." See here.

[Jordan West · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sort of metatextual, shaggy-dog story version of the kind of 'superhumans secretly conspire and compete for their elusive goal' saga that Roger Zelazny excelled at, by way of Flann O'Brien and Jan Potocki; while chock-full of offbeat lyricism and imagination, in the end it seems Lafferty's intention for his novel is to be another Man Who Was Thursday, which is to say, an unconventional spiritual allegory tempered by the author's own singular brand of orthodox catholicism, so those sympathetic to such an outlook may get a greater mileage out of it, but despite the book's strengths (and my high hopes for it), I was ultimately left underwhelmed.

[Ivan Stoner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book melted my mind. R A Lafferty is next level. This is really really good. All these authors out there, and obviously there are those who for whatever reason never got the credit they deserved and languish in obscurity to this day. Lafferty is one of those.

Imagination like Jorge Luis Borges; madcap Irish willingness to break the reader's neck like Flann O'Brien; sublime Irish sense of language-scene-feeling like Joyce; melted over with the baroque Catholic darkness of Gene Wolfe.

I'm not sure I'd call it surrealist. But there's only the hint of a plot. This is about the dark blood of the Neanderthals that lives still among humanity. The Devil. It's an explanation of our satyrs and our psychopaths. But it's also just about memory and it's about putting images and emotions in the reader's mind that mirror the wildness of the demon people that are both protagonists and antagonists. It's a depiction of a wholly alien point of view.

Some of the other reviewers do the story more justice that I do, but I strongly disagree with those few that call this is "shaggy dog story." It's weird and opaque, sure, but Lafferty has an ability to be tight and profoundly meaningful at the same time.

I am going to get every book by R A Lafferty, and I am going to read them all.

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

The second book in the trilogy of which its title is the title, though it's also known as the _Argo_ trilogy, _The Devil Is Dead_ has much more novelistic unity than its predicessor, _Archipelago_. Where that book was basically a loosely-linked collection of anecdotes about five characters, _Devil_ closely follows one of them, Finnegan (which is not his real name, but then nobody in this series seems to use their real name...), on a fatal voyage and through its aftermath, which lasts several years.

Finnegan (who is subject to strange bouts of amnesia) comes to himself on a curbside talking with Saxon X. Seaworthy, a mysterious multimillionaire, and neither of them remembers (or admits to remembering) where they met or how they came to be here. In a series of bars Finnegan agrees to be one of the crew on Seaworthy's boat as it cruises down the coast (this seems to be happening in Galveston...) and across the Atlantic. Indeed he does, though it seems that he should have been dead before getting aboard. It seems further that Seaworthy and Finnegan met while one of them was burying the body of a man he'd murdered. And that man, Papadiabolous ("Papa Devil" in Greek) is aboard...

To summarize the plot, which I have already done great violence to, would be insanity. It twists, it turns, it turns back on itself like the fabulous Ouroboros, and yet it all makes a kind of linear sense. And it goes somewhere, and when it gets there, it stops. It may be the middle book of a trilogy, but by the Devil's children, it has its own beginning and middle and even an end.

This is Lafferty at his wacky, puzzling best. There is much more going on beneath the surface of the book than on it, and I can't claim to have caught all, or even most, of it. But I caught enough to know that this is, on the one hand, a very Catholic book, and, on the other, a book about a kind of mythology based on the Neandertals or maybe other race, who came before us, were displaced by us, still exists among and within us, and wants vengeance and our destruction. The Other People have powers that we do not understand, and it's rather a mystery how we displaced them at all, but because of those powers, and the thousands upon thousands of years they've had to plot our downfall, the only hope for the human race is for some of them to betray their people for our sake.

Oh, and? Finnegan is one of them. Or partly so, of the "double blood." Go figure! He has adventures and idylls and along the way he has to make moral choices, and in the end he does, and that's the plot down to its bare bones.

It's a funny book, not laugh-out-loud funny like Terry Pratchett or Donald Westlake, but funny in the way that tickles at the back of the brain and makes you chuckle hours or days later. Yes, it's a funny book...

[caracal-eyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can think of no better introduction for my review than the lines that begin the book in question, so:

"And they also tell the story of Papadiabolous the Devil and his company, and of two of the hidden lives of Finnegan; and how it is not always serious to die, the first time it happens.
"Here is one man who was buried twice and now lies still (but uneasy of mind) in his two separate graves. Here is another man who died twice--not at all the same thing. And here are several who are disinclined to stay dead: they don't like it, they won't accept it.
..."We will not lie to you. this is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will."


Maybe it was the tone, the sense of humor, maybe the characters, or perhaps the recurring character of the Devil (though I don't think the devil(s) had much in common themselves), but this book rather reminded me of At Swim-Two-Birds. It's been a while since I read that one, so I can't think of substantial, specific similarities, but I was reminded of it anyhow.

So the idea or theme that developed through the book was that of the conflict not only among people but within people--something like that; I say it badly. I'm not gonna mark this as a spoiler, since it was mentioned pretty early on in the book (though the fuller meaning came out gradually) that 'Finnegan', our protagonist, is of the 'double blood,' as the mark on his wrist (not always visible, or visible to all, but there nonetheless) shows. He meets others like himself. The mark means--what? Well, I s'pose that's explained fairly well by the characters themselves, so I won't try to get too detailed here. The Introduction says it better than I:

"Set off the devils and the monsters, the wonderful beauties and the foul murderers...set them off in whatever apposition you wish. Glance quickly to discover whether you have not the mark on your own left wrist, barely under the skin. ...Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not it your own unconsciousness; you are inside them, trapped, and howling to get out."

I'm sure I missed things because I read this primarily for the fun of reading, rather than with the obsessive eye for detail I turn on assigned literature (such that underlining and highlighting at some points obscure the text, sigh...), and because I am not expected to write an essay, I'm not exactly motivated to think up a clear, concise way to express my interpretation of this book. So I'm not gonna do that, or not any more than I've already done using mostly quotations from the novel itself. Can't help myself, I guess I just like the Introduction, so here's some more, why not: "Put the nightmare together. If you do not wake up screaming, you have not put it together well." And maybe I haven't put it together so well, because I haven't woken up screaming, and kept looking as I read for the elements of such terror without really finding any...but that wondering is itself unsettling, and the more I consider the story, the more I think I see the nightmare in it...

Anyway, the 5-star rating is in part because I enjoyed the story, the characters, the writing, all the things that make the reading itself enjoyable. Beyond the readability factor, there was a prevailing idea that built throughout, that was as much a part of the story as the characters and setting, an idea that appealed to the love of mystery, myth, and magic that draws me to 'fantasy'-type books in the first place, but which appealed just as much to the part of me that's drawn to stuff like ancient Greek philosophy, psychology, sociology and the like. Of course, mystery myth and magic have plenty to do with philosophy psychology and sociology, so it makes perfect sense that this book of gargoyles and mermaids, angels and devils should have plenty to do with ourselves and our own world--as much as our past has to do with our present and our future.

Now, if I wanted to be really really tedious and write the longest friggin' review ever, I'd maybe find some more stuff from the book to talk about, more things I liked or found worthy of further thought, but I don't need to do that, do I? Just read it yourself. No doubt my review is more confusing than helpful, or certainly it seems to to me.

"Is that not an odd introduction? I don't understand it at all."

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's almost impossible to describe the richness and quality of Lafferty's writing, a combination of the comic, the absurd, the brilliant, the fascinating. No way to prepare for it either - it's so original - although some of this book reminded me of Borges, Bulgakhov, Faulkner, Mieville, Portis, and other greats. The first two pages are incomprehensible on a first read (fully comprehensible when reread after finishing the book), and the first 20-30 pages barely so. Lafferty has possibly the most ingenious use of word selection I've ever come across, the words and sentences are always a bit "off" in a very consistent stylistic way. He throws things at you, it all sticks though.

And yet this same style varies: he throws in poems, dreams, tall tales, absurdities, random and bizarre asides. The recurring themes of double persons, confused identity, ambiguity, obscurity, confused narrator, uncertain motive, paranoia, are constantly keeping you off balance. Each chapter begins with a quote, some real, some absurd, some of them are a source of plot or sense to the book. You frequently don't know where you are at the beginning of the chapter, it can be elliptical, but overarching it all is a sense of plot, an actual story. The story is of such limited relevance, I don't think it's worth delving into, but the book is saved from collapsing into impressionism by it, it does provide a sort of structure.

No one else writes like this. And yet, he's able to pull of scenes of amazing depth and power, most notably on the top of the mountain in Naxos, but also the scene in Biloxi stand out. There's a bit of a comic campiness to the book, with frequent scenes of drinking. The women characters in the book are quite vivid and never simple, they are often contrasted with each other. They are different from the male characters, who tend to be much simpler and generally the same.

Lafferty is included as a science fiction writer but there's none of that here, he's what I would call a purely "imaginative" writer (like Mieville's "The City and the City"). There's a bit of oddness but no more than Bulgakov, although Lafferty is not writing allegory of any sort. Much is made of his Catholicism but there's even less of that as well. He is completely impossible to bucket or capture in a formulated phrase, and any attempt to do so is really a failure to appreciate him.

Lafferty is a pure artist expresssing his self through his style. Nothing but honesty here, not even the slightest condescension to the reader. Frequently in comic novels (which I believe this fundamentally is) there's a loss of tone, a resolution, a gratification, which detracts from the level of the writing. None here, even the ending (which can only be described as "perfect") he is able to maintain his artistic level.

There's so much in this book (novel?) that struck me as "pure genius", although I'm not sure how to recommend it exactly. If I ran an MFA program in creative writing, I would definitely include works like this to spark the stylistic imagination of my students. I would be dishonest to recommend it to fans of science fiction or fantasy, they would be disappointed as it hardly falls within the genre. I think in the end, my recommendation is for anyone who likes and appreciates the truly unusual and unique in literature, and laughs out loud when reading something so brilliantly clever and absurd that you are completely grateful to have come across the author, and want to read everything he wrote, which I kind of want to do right now.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would have known that a writer like R A Lafferty existed until you discover him?

Before last year, not me for sure. And judging by the mere 27 readers who have reviewed this stupefyingly exhilarating novel by May 2011, not many other people either. And yet Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown have books in millions of houses around the globe?

Looking at the world with that in mind it's hard not to see it as a crushingly undeserving place.

Not that I am about to compare the kind of writing Lafferty does with the type of writing those two do. In truth, I can't really compare this type of writing with any type that ANYONE else does. The best way I can describe him is to ask you to think about a storyteller simultaneously possessed with the spirits of Baron Munchausen, Flann O'Brien and Tex Avery.

Yep, that's the best I can do.

For what it's worth, and thats not a great deal, the plot follows Finnegan - a dead man who has already died before anyway and is also another man who is also a gargoyle - on a journey from his own death (the second one) to the grave of the devil, who as the title suggests, is himself already dead, although he might also still be alive and along for the ride.

That's one hell of a shaggy dog story, but thats the least of it because the whole book is pretty much an ongoing cavalcade of shaggy dog stories. Lafferty is a laughing loon who likes to spin and shatter a thousand plates one after the other with all the careless, shrugged-shouldered aplomb of a superior Tommy Cooper skit.

This was the first of his books I ever read, so I will always remember it fondly (what I can remember of it anyway, the whole thing was far too loopy to recall distinctly). It didn't make a whole load of sense, though I believe it's part of a larger work, which no doubt makes as little sense by the end.

Lafferty's work is not that easy to get hold of, my hardback copy cost a fair amount, but believe me his work is worth hunting out. His short stories might just be even better than his novels, although it's all good to me.

Pricelessly entertaining.

[Keith Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

From time to time the Devil comes to Earth and sires children who wreck all sorts of havoc on the world, but inevitably a few of the children rebel and serve as humanity's only defense against the devil-spawn. Or maybe a strain of Neanderthal DNA survives in humanity and from time to time Neanderthals are born who are far more intelligent than regular humans and most seek to wipe out humanity, but a few rebel against the others and attempt to protect humanity. The main character of The Devil is Dead is a drunken Irishman who may have killed the Devil, and may be one of the Devil's sons, or may be a Neanderthal, or it may just be a bunch of crazy tall-tales told in a bar.

[Jeroen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every couple of months I get an insurmountable urge to read another Lafferty novel. I don’t know what it is. I tell myself: “I MUST read another Lafferty novel,” and kick my other plans out the door. His writing is like a drug, like an opioid for the brain. I want that next dopamine hit of being flabbergasted by what I am reading.

The first chapter of The Devil is Dead is so strange and odd and heavy on symbolism that it is impossible to just regard it as a simple shaggy-dog story. It might it fact be a retelling of an origin story of humanity, or something along those lines. It starts with a man named Finnegan who wakes up on the sidewalk of a street (some editions have the subtitle “Finnegan’s Awake”) while he’s in conversation with a sailor named Saxon Seaworthy, and both of them are covered in dirt and blood and sea shells. The text hints that Finnegan is actually a Neanderthal, and that the world they woke up in is actually a new world, and Seaworthy with his granite face seems to represent the Earth, the oceans and rocks. He is very giving with his funds. They go into a bar, and a girl named Anastasia tidies Finnegan up. Makes him human, maybe, or maybe not. Later it becomes clear that someone else was supposed to take his place in the story - a proper human perhaps. There are hints that the girl may be a mermaid. And then the Devil himself enters the bar, Papa-D, old Papadiabolous, and not much later the four of them leave the port on Seaworthy’s vessel the Brunhilde, and their objective is a voyage around the world and maybe find their old land - maybe paradise.

But the story is told in such a smooth and seemingly improvisational way that a reader might think that this is just a tall tale about a port town and a couple of strange companions joining up for a journey, but the number of casual references in all the names and the offhand layering of hints and mysteries is so dense that Lafferty must have been channeling five thoughts at the same time. It is mind-boggling. Finnegan expresses doubt about going on a voyage with the Devil on board, but Anastasia says of course you want to go sailing with the Devil. It is not as if humanity has any choice. Seaworthy and Papa-D feel like they have some connection with Finnegan, like they are shady uncles.

I can’t trust anything what I am reading in this novel, and instead have to trust Lafferty that things will become clear eventually; and they do only partially, in beautiful ways and ways that hint at mysteries forever hidden. Characters transform, become fish, become the golden sunlight on the waves, but only for those who can see them right. Every chapter juggles a bit with reality and provides hints as to what is going on underneath the plot. And all this while the Devil is spreading blankets for a beach barbecue and the mermaid pretends to be seasick to show off her green colors, and a smart donkey named Papapaleologus shows up too, who is a descendant of a Byzantine emperor.

Lafferty hints in a foreword that the plot of this novel is a sort of do-it-yourself puzzle box, and even ends with the lines: “What kind of introduction is this? I don��t understand it at all.” Multiple characters have died at one point, maybe even before the story started. Sometimes people are literally replaced, with surrogates or revenants. Finnegan’s memory is confused about it. But there is a plot. The Brunhilde is a plague ship and sails from port to port to spread chaos around the world. The Devil, the mermaid, the sea goddess, Finnegan the Neanderthal, they are all members of an “older human race”, and their ship reawakens the old race all over the world. At least, the fragments of them that are still present in modern humans. The journey is a conspiracy of sorts.

A reader may find themselves somewhere around the 70% mark and wonder where the plot exactly lost its cohesion, but it is still there. Finnegan is simply on the run and holes up in various location with various people. A brilliant chapter has Finnegan sitting in a bar which is such a special bar that it has fifty regulars, with names like Big Swede Swanson, Shrimp Boat Gordon and Giuseppe (Raviola Joe) Gabrielangelo. Lafferty sighs that he won’t be able to tell us all their crazy stories, but precedes to so anyway in a whirlwind of tall tales, and at the end of the chapter he tells us that we will never hear from them again. What was the point? Finnegan is learning to appreciate humanity, that’s all, because someone of the old race has to be on their side.

Despite all that I have just told, The Devil is Dead is one of the easier Lafferty novels to follow, and perhaps the most consistently entertaining. The trick is to enjoy the details but to not get lost in them. Surface again after each chapter and discover that all the silly stories in it were part of the metaphor, or remember some line from earlier in the novel that suddenly makes sense. Lafferty always leaves me with the feeling that there are depths to his silly stories that I haven’t fully realised. Again, he hasn’t disappointed me. The guy is some kind of genius.

[Daniel Polansky]

A wandering drunk finds himself entangled in a strange web of mystical doings, to give much more of the plot would be to ruin the thing. Another book I picked up because of a mention by Gene Wolfe, and you can see the influence. Stylistically its extremely peculiar, it takes half the text before you realize what genre you're dealing with, but it still manages to offer some narrative thrills. Cool, weird, I'm trying to pick up more by Lafferty but alas, he seems to be largely forgotten.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

You’re never quite sure whether R. A. Lafferty is taking the piss or not… Finnegan (whose real name is Solli) has helped another to bury a man, or a beast, or something which may or may not be the Devil. The original problem is that the Devil, going by the unlikely name of Popadiabolous, just won’t stay dead. Thus begins an odyssey of epic proportions, where Finnegan and a motley crew of assorted ruffians and generally unsavoury characters revisit the old Caribbean pirate havens and the voodoo parts of New Orleans pursued by the Devil (or his twin). We are also never quite sure whether the characters are who they say they are, or are lookalikes replacing them. You can’t call the novel unstructured, it’s just that is unlike any structure I’ve seen before - it may be cyclical, where the final chapter flows back into the start. Is anything resolved? Not really, but in a strange way it doesn’t really matter. This is a prose journey that you need to take (at least once) despite the air of amiable self-indulgence.

[Jaiden Edelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+ stars: a hidden gem that emanates an aura of enchanting mythology while shining bright from within. Beautifully frivolous.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third book of Lafferty's I've read and probably my favorite, though I'd have to circle back through Fourth Mansions to be sure (I loved it enough to interest me in buying and reading a lot more.) This one actually coheres (kind of) at the end far more than the Annals. Other times, amusingly, the voice was so Gene Wolfe (of the Free Live Free, A Borrowed Man variety) that I nearly laughed out loud for surely Lafferty was an influence. And it might cast a light on some of those really obscure early Wolfe novels like Devil in a Forest and Peace and so on if I thought to re-read... Wow! I guess this is part of a trilogy?? So I might have to track down more stuff.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

2½. One of Lafferty's weaker efforts. Apparently it is the sequel to his very hard-to-find novel "Archipelago," and reading that book first may have improved my appreciation for this one. However I do not have $200 to spend on a copy, and that seems to be the going rate at the moment. "The Devil Is Dead" has everything you'd expect in a Lafferty novel, but it is so disorganized and rambling as to be positively tedious at times.

[Devin Bayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird

[Arthur B · Rating 2 out of 5]

It shouldn't be possible for a novel that's barely over 200 pages to feel overlong and tedious, and yet... Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/200...

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was possibly really very good? Or possibly awful?

I could barely follow a word of it

[Abe Something · Rating 3 out of 5]

“We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will." Ooh, very Borgesian!

I read the book based on this line from a recommendation: Lafferty is excellent "if you’re able to set aside all expectations about conventional plotting, pacing, character development, and narrative causality."

I took one star off because I was unable to set aside my expectations, and another star because Lafferty made it so difficult to do that. There is no doubt about Lafferty's genius, and I look forward to reading more of his work. Next time I will know what I am getting into, and I suspect a second read of this book would yield a higher rating. Be warned, there is no preparing for Lafferty's work--he stands apart from all other writers. There are near-peers (thinking here of Pynchon, Boiy Cassares, and the Strugatsky's) but this guy is off on his own, in a good, if extraordinarily challenging way.

Loved this: “Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out.”

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author and this book by him was recommended, if not loaned, by my freshman nextdoor neighbor in Loose Hall at Grinnell College.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written magical realism, but honestly, hard to follow at points.