How to Make Friends with Demons

by Graham Joyce

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 how to make friends with demons.

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Urban Fantasy, Magical Realism, Demons, Contemporary

298 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2001

About the author

Graham Joyce (22 October 1954 – 9 September 2014) was an English writer of speculative fiction and the recipient of numerous awards for both his novels and short stories.

After receiving a B.Ed. from Bishop Lonsdale College in 1977 and a M.A. from the University of Leicester in 1980. Joyce worked as a youth officer for the National Association of Youth Clubs until 1988. He subsequently quit his position and moved to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Crete to write his first novel, Dreamside. After selling Dreamside to Pan Books in 1991, Joyce moved back to England to pursue a career as a full-time writer.

Graham Joyce resided in Leicester with his wife, Suzanne Johnsen, and their two children, Joseph and Ella. He taught Creative Writing to graduate students at Nottingham Trent University from 1996 until his death, and was made a Reader in Creative Writing.

Joyce died on 9 September 2014. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma in 2013.

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked this one up to read. I did not expect to sit an entire day and finish the entire book. I did not expect to cry. I though I might laugh, and yes I did several times out loud. I did not expect to have a verbal conversation with the story teller. At one point I might have said "Why did you not go home with that women you crazy man". Again I was sucked into this world. What world you ask. Well I am not sure. The world that cats see and we can't? The world that as children we see but when we reach adulthood we loose our vision ? And best yet, this is a story about books and the power they have. This story is about family and friendship. And maybe a love story as well. And lets not forget the demons. They are the most important part.

[Kendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was like falling off the world, and falling for days, until you hit a shelf. There you lay for a while until, struggling to your feet in the dark, you found steps hewn in the stone. Though your heart felt too heavy to climb the steps, climb them you did, knowing they were without number.”

Note: In the US, this book is "How to Make Friends With Demons" by Graham Joyce

Graham Joyce never fails for me. He remains my favorite author. Seamlessly balancing this world and the surreal, he uses clear storytelling with extreme subtlety.

This book is a little different than previous. Perhaps that’s why he originally wrote it under a pseudonym.

There’s no way to thoroughly do justice to the storyline. Essentially, the narrator sees demons everywhere … in penance, almost. You spend the novel wondering if he’s truly seeing them, or if it’s his imagination, or something else entirely (this is the beauty of Joyce; a choice where you wouldn’t think it possible).

This is the first book I’ve read in which the narrator is truly unreliable. It was jarring, but fascinating.

When I got to the below passage, I was actually moved to tears by the raw truth of it.
”I looked at the hardness of my own heart and I looked at this great capital city, where we have no leaders and no one to admire. Our government ministers are fraudsters, liars and deceivers without conviction, whose only ideology is to cling to power; our captains of commerce are wolves dining out of blood and bone; … our media poison us with consumerism, a hideous bloated worm eating its own tail …
I rage! I do! I rage when I see the lives of ordinary people squandered. The lives of young men and women, weak like me, going under the tidal sludge of drugs spilling across the sink-estates of the nation; the homeless drifting like wraiths; people eating themselves into oblivion and doping themselves with bad television; brave boy soldiers sacrificed in the deserts for the ambitions of the insanely rich. I rage! I weep! To see life held so cheap! And all I have as antidote as I stand lost in the middle of these leaders who are not leaders, these demons hidden in the souls of men and women, are my humanity and my rage.”

[Kristen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, I read all 308 pages of this book, but I'm not exactly sure how to write a review of it, because truthfully, I don't have the first clue of what the hell the book was about, or what actually happened in it.

There was something about demons attaching themselves to people, forgeries of rare books, poetry written by one person passed of as that of another, broken marriages, a slightly deranged story about what happened to a British soldier serving in Iraq that seems to suggest demonic involvement, messy family dynamics, an angelic woman helping homeless people. Oh and A LOT of wine-drinking [I was all for that part!!].

The problem was that these disparate components never seemed to ever come even close to forming some sort of cohesive whole. At times it felt like it was the written transcript of someone's very nasty acid trip.

I just never knew what the heck was going on with these kind of crazy bits and pieces, and how they were intended to come together into one book. It seemed to eventually end well, although I can't even say THAT with any certainty. Overall, this book just left me perplexed about what the point was. I didn't get it.

[Lynda Rucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham Joyce, so brilliant as always. It's frustrating that such a fine writer seems consistently unable to break out to the larger mainstream. He'd easily fit alongside, say, Michael Chabon, but I think he's better.

[Alyssia Cooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know, I’m not sure if this novel had an actual plot or if it was just the entertaining ramblings through a rather odd mans life, but I really don’t care. I had great fun reading it and surely that has to count for one hell of a lot. It’s superbly written, to the degree the half the time you don’t notice the it really isn’t going anywhere fast and the other half you simply don’t care.

The characters are wonderfully real and they leap off the pages at you with all their faults and all their flaws. They immerse you in the grit of London, whilst at the same time taunting you with glimpses of demons lurking inside the world of man. The dividing line between reality and fantasy is blurred, explanations are offered on both sides of that eternal spectrum and it is up to you what you will make of it. But this truly is a tale of the characters. It’s a tale of the fine line between sanity and madness. It’s a tale of the blurred edges of our conscience and what it can drive us to do.

It’s a tale of the future and the past and the two intertwine in the most unnerving of ways and how forgiveness is a powerful tool which can be wielded with a scalpel or a hammer. It’s a tale of the frailties and mortalities of the human condition, and of how love and life can be the greatest joy or the greatest trial or perhaps both at once. It offers a witty and dry viewpoint at some of the highs and the lows of humanity... and they are not always where you would expect to find them.

It’s a meandering and sometimes aimless novel that moves along very much at its own pace, but it reminded me of taking a slow cruise down a swollen jungle river. The characterisations and life stories and wholesome and full enough that you don’t mind the wandering pace.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is of course Graham Joyce and the book will be published in the US too as How to Make Friends with a Demon under his name, but the joke in the UK author byline works very well too...

I have never read Mr. Joyce's fiction before, tried once but did not hook me, but this book is so wonderful that it made me order 3 more books by him and if I like them even half as this one, I will get the rest too.

William Heaney is a mid-late forties UK government bureaucrat in charge of a Youth funding umbrella organization and an antique book dealer hobbyist. But under his polished, charming exterior, he is a very complex, tortured man with a fondness for wine and an ability to see the demons inherent in most humans. His wife of 20 years Fay left him 3 years ago for a celebrity chef, and while his two girls, Sarah a college age teen and Claire a 13 year old are still on good terms with him, his 15 year old son Robbie refuses to talk with him since William cut his posh private school tuition and sent him to a local school after Robbie showed snobbery that affronted him.

William has also been atoning for some perceived misdeeds from his college years that led to a lot of tragedy and death even though he was not directly responsible.

His atonement takes the unusual form of selling forged antiquarian books - done by one of his main two friends the strange painter/artist Shinx - to rich guys and using the profits to fund charities, especially the Go To Point a homeless last resort shelter run by his friend Antonia who annoyed the government enough by actually being useful to the down on their luck people that she is kept from official funding, grants and such and she is harassed for being such an embarrassment to the powers to be.

He also provides poetry to the other of his main friends, a youngish bisexual multi-ethnic photo model Jaz who finds the "marks" for the forgeries, and despite that both William and Jaz believe the poetry to be rubbish doggerel, such are the winds of political corectness that Jaz became very renowned as a young minority - both ethnic and sexual - poet, invited to galas, competing for prizes...

Of course at their bar haunt the 3 against the world friends laugh at their "pranks" and commiserate about their failing private lives...

But one day William meets an unusual 29 year old girl that calls herself Yasmin, and also uses all his private money and even gets a loan to fund Antonia's Go To Point shelter, risking bankruptcy and possible exposure if Shinx does not come through with their latest forgery and the confluence of these events sends him on a journey of redemption.

Extraordinary book and it became one of my top 5 fantasy and all around books of the year. A masterpiece...

[Michael Allan Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most enjoyable, elegant stories I've read in a long time, and also one of the most difficult to classify: not quite a horror novel, not exactly a contemporary dramedy with humor that's often black. Neither a romance story, although that looms large, and containing an moving extended story-within-a-story of a British soldier in the Gulf War that would be well-worth reading alone outside of the context of the book.

William Haney is, at first glance, a seemingly ordinary man in present-day London with a thoroughly relatable set of problems: he loathes the mindless bureaucratic red tape of his government job, he loves wine a little too much, he's affable yet lonely and dealing with his ex-wife who left him for a minor celebrity chef and took his three children to set up house with an annoying twit. He also donates a considerable amount to charitable causes and is the sole benefactor keeping a homeless shelter afloat ... money which he obtains as part of a small forgery ring of rare and valuable antiquarian books that he passes off to unsuspecting collectors. He gets associated with a tragic suicide that could be considered by some a failed terrorist attack on the Queen. And William can see demons: not only the ones that are haunting him, but those that trouble and manipulate others. And it all began with his discovery of the remnants of an occult ritual in the attic of his college dorm, based on materials from a stolen unpublished manuscript he completely made up as a lark to try to sell as an 'authentic' work of magic and involving photographs of five girls he was romantically involved with, all of whom begin to suffer strange accidents and mishaps, some of them lethal.

There's a lot of allegory at work here: the titular demons are not just supernatural entities, but they also represent our mistakes, failures, and shortcomings, and our inability to exorcise the past and free ourselves. There are moments where there's certainly a thin line between the demons being poignant stand-ins for undiagnosed and untreated mental illness: is this really a tale of malevolent otherworldly entities, or the delusions of a high-functioning schizophrenic? (The author teases out both as distinct possibilities, inviting the reader to play detective as they go along.)

Joyce performs an amazing set of creative sleight-of-hand flourishes, not only using first person narration to create a protagonist who is both likeable and charming yet also duplicitous to everyone, including the reader, but deftly intercutting between past and present to unravel the mystery at both ends. Brilliant, engaging work that was difficult to put down. Fans of Neil Gaiman will certainly feel at home here.

[Tita · Rating 3 out of 5]

O nosso protagonista é William Heaney, que para além do seu emprego, escreve poesia para um amigo, organiza edições falsas dos livros de Jane Austen, mas desenganem-se se pensam que William é má pessoa. Nada disso, o lucro que recebe das falsificações vai para um lar de sem-abrigos. Além disso, falta um pormenor importante e que faz a ligação entre os personagens, Heaney vê demónios.
A escrita de Graham Joyce é simples mas estruturada, com um narrador que nos envolve na história e que nos permite "sentir" como se a história fosse nossa, sempre com um humor algo sarcástico.
Gostei também do leque de personagens. Não são personagens típicas,temos personagens com a sua dose de loucura, excentricidade e problemas, mas temos também Antónia, que acaba por ser a pessoa mais positiva que William conhece.
Além das personagens, temos também os locais onde a acção se vai desenrolando, onde quero salientar os pubs ingleses que transmitem a sensação de obscuridade. Temos ainda os demónios que dão à história um ar mais sobrenatural, no entanto gostava que este aspecto tivesse sido um pouco mais explorado e explicado, pois cheguei ao fim e não fiquei totalmente esclarecida se seriam reais ou fruto da imaginação de William.
A acção foi decorrendo, ora na actualidade, ora voltando várias vezes ao passado, o que pode ser algo confuso para alguns leitores pois não vamos tendo nenhuma indicação especifica do espaço temporal.
Foi uma leitura mais leve do que esperava e até algo divertida. No entanto, esperava um pouco mais em relação aos demónios, devido a todo o mistério em torno do passado de William.

[Cat Rambo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graham Joyce's work is always full of wonderful darkness. No exception with this one.

[John Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book. I recommend highly. Compares well with Neil Gaiman, but with a very distinctive voice. I can't believe I've never read anything by Graham Joyce before.

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I surprised myself and ended up really loving this book. It's not perfect but in some ways it really touched me.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite possibly the greatest novel that I have experienced in my adult life. I swear Graham Joyce must write these works in reverse order because every time I finish one, I am mind swept with how did we get here. This book originally published in the U.K. in '08 written under pseudonym of the principal character, William Heaney, was republished in '09 out of San Francisco. It does have the book with in a book quality across many layers. I also found about six errors in formatting. Spring busy, it took over six weeks to finish the 298 descriptively rich pages. Overdue by three days from the Public Library, I will gladly pay the fine.

"Then, just to satisfy myself, I switched on the tall standard lamp. What I saw made me rear back. It doesn’t matter how many you’ve encountered, it always hits you like a thump in the gut. It was a demon. They can be seen in certain light but not in others, and now with the standard lamp on I could see it slumped in the corner of the room, against the book case. It looked desperately unhappy; it was covering its face with its hands, and peering at me from behind its fingers, waiting.
…
I looked back up at the sky, blinking at the lustrous beauty of the ascending and departing demons. They formed an alphabet I was beginning to learn to read. They were fire in the sky."

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Heaney, head of the the UK’s National Organisation for Youth Advocacy, leads a troubled life. His wife left him for a celebrity pastry chef, his teenage son hates him, and his oldest daughter has moved back in with him — and brought along her boyfriend. Heaney can also see demons. In his latest novel, How to Make Friends With Demons, Graham Joyce brings these entities to vivid life for his readers, too.

Ever since a traumatic event in college some 20 years ago, Heaney witnesses the hidden demons that haunt us all, creatures that only a few can see.

There are one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven known demons. Precisely. Okay I know that Fraser in his study claimed to have identified a further four, but it’s plain that he’s confusing demons with psychological conditions. I mean, a pathological tendency to insult strangers in the street is more likely caused by a nervous disorder than the presence of a demon. And chronic masturbation is what it is. I suspect that Fraser didn’t even believe in his own case studies. I think he just “discovered” four new demons so that he could peddle his bloody awful book.

According to Heaney, common demons include the “messy intellectuality” manifested in compulsive footnoting, the “collecting demon,” and demons that feed on various emotional ailments. Alcohol is not one of them, but rather “a series of volatile hydroxyl compounds that are made from hydrocarbons by distillation. The fact that it is highly addictive or that it can drive men or women to extreme and destructive behavior does not make it a demon.” Heaney, incidentally, spends large portions of the novel in pubs, often inebriated.

He also fronts a trio of forgers who fake antiquarian books. Heaney sells the illicit products to unsuspecting marks. At heart an altruistic philanthropist organization, his crew promptly donates all proceeds to the GoPoint Centre, a perpetually underfunded London homeless shelter.

Through potential buyers, Heaney meets two individuals who change his life. Toy-shop owner Otto introduces him to the first, the homeless Desert Storm veteran Seamus, who has chained himself to a railing in front of Buckingham Palace. Lashed with what appear to be explosives, he threatens to blow himself up if the police approach him. Heaney and Otto meet with Seamus.

“I want an audience with the Queen. I want to tell her what I know.”

“Eh? The Queen? Queen doesn’t give a fuck about the likes of you and me, Seamus.”

“I’ve been a fucking loyal soldier to the fucking Queen. I want to tell her what I know. And if she won’t come down here, she can ride raggy-arsed to Birmingham.” Whatever this phrase meant, Seamus found its utterance very funny. He tipped back his head. “Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Otto looked at me again. “Tell him the Queen won’t come. Tell him she’s eating pie in the palace, and too busy.”

“He’s right, Seamus,” I said. “The Queen won’t come here.”

The old soldier looked around at the gritty pavement on either side of him. “Yeh,” he said seriously, “it’s bit mucky, innit? Maybe we should sweep up a bit.”

The second encounter occurs while Heaney drinks in the Museum Tavern — legendary watering hole for Karl Marx located across from the British Museum — where he runs into poet and frequent Heaney client Ellis, and Ellis’s beguiling young companion.

She held out a tiny white hand across the table. “My name’s Yasmin.”

No, it isn’t, I wanted to say, because she didn’t look or talk at all like a Yasmin. Demon of false naming, we know all about that one. But I held my tongue. “William Heaney.”

“I know.”

Well, there we had it. She knew my name before I’d revealed it; I didn’t know hers even after she’d declared it to me. Another demon in there somewhere. Perhaps we held each other’s gaze a splinter too long because Ellis said, “I think I’m going to vomit.”

“How do you two people know each other?” I asked genially.

And as she told me, my demon, my real demon, who had been listening, crouched, always attentive, breathed its sweet and poisoned breath in my ear. “Take her away from the lout. Take her home with you. Lift her skirt.”

She talked at length and I listened. Voices are sometimes like the grain in a strip of wood. You can hear the character of someone’s experience in their voice. Hers was warm, and vital, but damaged.

The alluring Yasmin promises the most riveting and engrossing fictional femme in fantastic literature since the elusive title character of Jeffery Ford’s sensational
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque .

Leaping forward and backward through time, Joyce expertly weaves a cohesive novel that essentially chronicles a mid-life crisis. The book successfully explores a range of emotional states with a heady combination of horror, humor, and wonder, while maintaining its center on the kindhearted, confused, and at times delusional narrator Heaney. How to Make Friends With Demons, expanded from his O. Henry Award-winning short story “An Ordinary Soldier for the Queen,” displays author Graham Joyce in all as his finery and ranks among the best novels of the year.

This review originally appeared in the San Antonio Current, September 9, 2009.

[Chris Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting take on guilt, and how it changes your life and the lives of those around you.

[Steven Abel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The cover suggests the book is about a guy who is a master forger who sees demons, the book itself has pretty much nothing to do with either of those things. At about halfway through I was asking myself why I should care about William Heaney. The story is a fairly mundane tale of some bloke whose having what seems like a midlife crisis. Oh and he sees Demons not that it really matters.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham Joyce has an ability to write stories that defy easy description. This novel, which was also published under the title “Memoirs of a Master Forger,” has for a protagonist an extremely unreliable narrator who has a heart of gold but a troubled past, and the two are interconnected. He “sees” demons all around and refers to reference books in which these demons are supposedly ennumbered, but it doesn’t take long for you to start to question both the existence of the book and the demons themselves. And that inability to distinguish reality from fantasy continues throughout the book.

This book appeared in 2008 and by that time Joyce had made enough of a name for himself that his audience knew to expect strangeness and charm from his novels. Unlike debut novels, which are now required to start fast and explosively, this novel is a slow burn, enabling you to get into the life and psyche of the characters before the explosion happens (which it does, about halfway in). By that time, it’s almost anti-climactic, another bit of weird in a book filled to the brim with wonder.

I love this kind of thing, and Joyce remains—next to Jonathan Carroll—one of those writers whom I’ve never disliked anything they’ve ever written.

[Nadia Batista · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graham Joyce apaixonou-me desde o primeiro livro que li seu, Os Factos da Vida. Mal tive oportunidade de ler outra obra sua, não hesitei, e assim Memórias de um Mestre Falsário veio parar às minhas mãos. As expectativas para esta leitura eram muito altas, e não fiquei desiludida.

A história é acerca de um homem, William Heaney, que escreve poesia para um amigo - poesia muito apreciada - e que tem como ocupação falsificar livros antigos e raros, cujo lucro reverte a favor de uma associação solidária. Entre bebidas e demónios, a vida deste personagem vai-se desenrolando, num caminho um pouco negro, ao mesmo tempo que outras revelações acerca da sua vida são relatadas.
A forma como Graham Joyce escreve é simplesmente viciante. É muito simples e de fácil interpretação, com um ritmo rápido e agradável. Isto é pouco para se dizer acerca da escrita do autor, de tão simples e complexa se torna, mas receio que me falham as palavras correctas para a descrever. Quem gostar deste autor facilmente pode comprovar as minhas afirmações, pois sentimo-nos de tal modo enredados pelas palavras e frases que nem damos pelas páginas a voarem. Isto aliado a personagens fantásticas e bem construídas, torna-se dois factores na excelência desta obra. William é completamente doido. O seu raciocínio, a sua lógica, a sua forma de ver o mundo, acompanhado de demónios. Os copos de vinho. O medo de amar, a bondade generosa, tudo neste personagem é de tal modo intrincado que chegamos ao fim com a sensação não só de o ter conhecido realmente em pessoa, como a gostar dele.
Mas não é só William que brilha em Memórias de um Mestre Falsário. Jaz - um bissexual que vive da fama da poesia escrita por William - e Stinx - um artista que faz falsificações perfeitas e com a vida amorosa constantemente destroçada - são também personagens bastante especiais, assim como Antonia, a luz do livro. O próprio Seamus, que entra pelas páginas do livro dentro e que por momentos nos faz esquecer do livro que estamos a ler, é bastante incomum, com traços quase paranóicos, sendo boa pessoa. Yasmin, a personagem duvidosa da história: podemos confiar, ou não? Até o pormenor do companheiro da ex-mulher de William está bem construído - é até esse detalhe que o génio de Graham chega.
E depois há o ambiente criado. Grande parte da história é passada em pubs ingleses - cada qual diferente, com um sentimento único, mas todos inegavelmente sedutores. Dá vontade de visitar cada um deles e sentir as mesmas coisas que William/Graham descreve. Detalhado sem roçar sequer o aborrecido, o autor consegue transportar-nos para cada um desses pubs, deixando-nos com um leve sabor amargo por não estarmos lá a ler as suas páginas.
No entanto, no final do livro fiquei um pouco zangada comigo mesma, por não ter a certeza de que demónios são estes falados no livro. São demónios como estamos acostumados a imaginar, ou apenas os pequenos demónios de cada um, que andam encostados ao nosso ombro? E, para piorar, será que William vê mesmo estes demónios, ou imagina-os? Não consegui chegar a uma conclusão satisfatória, mas estou mais inclinada para o lado fantasioso da situação. São demónios que William vê, e penso que esta solução me completa.

Recomendo vivamente a leitura destas Memórias de um Mestre Falsário. São memórias, revelações, segredos e rebelias de pessoas, sentimentos, causas, com um toque sobrenatural e humano. Uma leitura obrigatória!

http://eu-e-o-bam.blogspot.pt/2013/12...

[J-D Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this first almost ten years ago, close to when it came out. I liked it then, and a few parts stuck in my memory, though most of the plot had faded. I re-read it on a whim while in law school, and found myself enjoying it much, much more a second time.

I wonder if it's because I now identify more with the older version of the protagonist, who is in his 40s and is featured in a majority of the novel, than his college self, who is featured in maybe a fifth of it.

This book is not an easy one to categorize. Horror? Romance? Mystery? I am not even sure if it's mean to be fantastical. Whatever it is, it is a work I found supremely moving, though it certainly would not be everyone's cup of tea.

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The cover design of this book led me to expect a pseudo-Victorian adventure, but this is actually a modern, urban book set in a London of lobby groups and homeless shelters.

William Heaney got involved in some supernatural shenanigans at university and now, middle-aged, is up to his ears in dodgy deals that are starting to fall apart - and he sees demons everywhere. In the middle of this he meets an fascinating and beautiful young woman who takes an unaccountable interest in him, but he still feels guilty about the way his previous relationships ended.

This wasn't bad, but the fantasy stuff seemed like just a bit of icing to make an everyday novel about a middle-aged guy falling for a younger woman more interesting. The demon stuff seems a bit intrusive even from the very early pages, like a bit of Piers Anthony being ladled into a Melvyn Bragg novel.

I'm happy for people to write relationship novels, but it's just not what I really go for. Relationships, emotions, love - in the books I tend to like best that stuff is all there to add ballast to a book, to give the protagonists a reason to fight the monsters, or the aliens, or whatever... What disappointed me with this book was that as it went on it became clear that the relationship stuff was the meat of it. The supernatural elements could have been almost completely removed without affecting the plot at all.

Of course, that doesn't make it a bad book, just one that didn't appeal to me.

There were some quite bad mistakes in this edition, though, to the point where I started to wonder if it was some kind of metatextual element that would lead to a flourish at the end... Antonia magically knows Otto's name (p. 81 - probably the result of dialogue being trimmed incautiously), a CID interview is referenced that doesn't come up anywhere else (p. 94 - maybe a scene was cut?), and then there's "bare to repeat it" (p. 162), "want her to now it" (p. 143) and "my tongue froze to roof my mouth" (p. 162). You expect that kind of thing in self-published and small press work, but it's a surprise to see it from a major publisher.

Even the title is annoyingly inaccurate, since it's really the memoir of a master forger's friend, the guy who sells the forgeries. By the end you could say it's been justified, but only bearly - sorry, barely.

[Tiffany Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

My rating system is for me and others- if you understand my rating system.

1 star- book was so bad I couldn’t even get into it (because why would anyone actually finish a one star or 2 star book? Life is too short)

2 stars- Book was good enough I made it to the halfway point but the author did not keep me interested with good enough writing/plot/characters (public service to others…your welcome).

3 stars- I finished the book, but only because I wanted to find out what happened and was not necessarily enjoying the ride.

4 stars- I finished and enjoyed the book.

5 stars- I finished the book and really felt something. The book impacted my life in some real way, or changed my perspective and/or motivated me to do or change something in my life.


I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and it stuck with me a long time after reading it. I picked it up at a used bookstore due to my draw towards grimdark and gothic reads, and the mysteriousness of it was appealing to me. I really liked it, due to the uniqueness of narration, the writing, and the character depth.

It's important to understand this book is not as the title implies, a guidebook on how to make friends with demons. I started reading it before purchase because the title is so attention-grabbing.
I quickly realized it was a beautifully written piece that seemed literature status to me. The narration is unique because the narrator is talking to you as if you're sitting in a room with him and he's telling you a story. That gave me a cozy, sitting in front of the fireplace feeling this entire book. This was very different, and this book was a refreshing read.

This book is about a man's struggle to battle his demons, and live a normal life as he tries to manage his current and past relationships. It's also good to know this book is not plot-driven, can be slow at times, and doesn't contain a great number of supernatural elements, as the title would imply. Although there are demons throughout the book, they are not the central focus, and only serve to shape the character, his thoughts, and his insights about the world. That being said it still does have that dark and cozy grimdark feeling (being in a dark pub in ancient England, with rain showers and thunderstorms). I want to reread this book, and read more of Graham Joyce.

[Alison C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoirs of a Master Forger, by William Heaney, is one of those "metafiction" novels, in the sense that the narrator and main character is called William Heaney, and he is setting out to explain how he came to be able to see demons and what that ability has meant in his life. Set in contemporary London, Heaney left a promising university career just before graduating, and in the intervening decades he's married, raised three kids, divorced - and watched demons, most of whom spend their time just watching humans. He has several scams going both to support himself and to help keep a privately-funded homeless shelter open: he writes rubbish poetry for a beautiful bisexual Pakistani man who is celebrated in literary circles for these poetic gems, and he works with a couple of friends in periodically creating fake "first editions" of serious books by the likes of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens; his "day job" is some vaguely defined bureaucratic job with some vaguely described government agency. He juggles all these bits and pieces of his life with aplomb, until he falls for Yasmin, a beautiful young woman who may not be what she seems....This is really well written and often extremely funny - Heaney has that dry British wit in spades - but I have to admit I didn't really know what was going on until, oh, the last 30 pages or so. Fortunately, my enjoyment of the writing salved the frustration of not quite getting it for the bulk of the novel, and the payoff is well worth it. Recommended.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, so right, so this guy Graham Joyce, he's written a book called How to Make Friends with Demons, okay? And it's kinda like that other book by the guy who wrote the book on Practical Demonkeeping, Christopher Moore—it's chatty and light, but it's about the Forces of Darkness all around us. The obligatory comparison to Douglas Adams is misplaced; this isn't that kind of humor (or humour) at all. But, you know, it's pretty good, actually... a fresh voice, a fresh perspective on the whole demon thing. So that's all right, then. The writing was deft; the early chapters really hooked me and pulled me along with William Heaney, the narrator, and even though the narrative shifts from present to past and back, sometimes several times in a chapter, I was never disoriented.

There were some bits I didn't like. Seamus' memoir went on a bit too long for my taste; a lot of that could've been cut without affecting the story. And... no one ever actually makes friends with any demons, so the title's a little misleading. But yeah, all in all, it's a pretty good read.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book while browsing the new book shelf at the Milwaukee Public Library.

It was published in the UK as "Memoirs of a Master Forger."

The protagonist has a real job which pays the bills, but moonlights in a ring that forges antique books.

The proceeds from the forgeries are donated to charity.

An odd book which also includes a Lovecraftian "Call up not...." theme.

[Rosie Ely · Rating 2 out of 5]

A coworker wanted me to read this. I just could not get into it. I really had a hard time grasping what the demons were supposed to represent and what the story was trying to say. In the end I gave up.

[Sara Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a way, typical Graham Joyce, but it's been a while since I read any of his work. He does this weird, dark take on fairy tales/myths/supernatural things. His books are all different. The first one I read was the Tooth Fairy, and I want to revisit it now. I absolutely loved that book!

[Miki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Languidly paced, slow-boiled, charming, and lovely. It was never exciting, but I also never wanted to put it down. Not actually about demons at all.

[Demetra · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You have to take your foot off the mine at some point."

[Jamie Killen · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to Make Friends with Demons (published in the UK as Memoirs of Master Forger) features lost love, terminal cancer, and the daily presence of malevolent demons. It’s also Graham Joyce’s lightest and breeziest book by far. Told in the first person, Demons alternates between a few days in the life of middle-aged antiquarian book forger William Heaney on the one hand, and the darker tale of how college-aged William developed his ability to see demons on the other.

The present-day storyline offers little in the way of conventional plot, but William and his acquaintances are likeable enough I barely cared. William’s days are taken up with a new book forgery project, an endeavor based more on boredom and his friendships with partners-in-crime Jaz and Stinx than on any financial desperation. The rest of his time is taken up with two very different relationships with two very different women. There is his platonic, longstanding bond with the saintly homeless-rights activist Antonia, but there is also a sudden romance with a mysterious young woman named Yasmin. Oh, and he sees demons everywhere.

The second storyline offers more familiar territory for Joyce readers. Young William enjoys a passionate romance with his college love, but that romance is threatened when he and a friend dabble in the occult and realize they have touched the supernatural realm. The dual timelines mean that the outcome of this second plot is never in doubt; we know William does not end up with his college lover, and we know he continues to see demons well into middle age. The pleasures of this storyline come not from any twists or turns, but rather in the melancholy, thoughtful treatment of young love and bad luck.

As in so many of Joyce’s books, the story is rife with potential pitfalls that he avoids through sheer strength of characterization. The fantasy of a middle-aged man being pursued by a gorgeous younger woman is an eye-roll-inducing cliché (ahem, Stieg Larsson), but by making William and Yasmin appear as well-rounded people, her desires and his desirability both make sense. His interactions with Stinx and Jaz, similarly, could easily devolve into the kind of Guy Ritchie caper we’ve all seen in roughly 10,000 British crime films, but Joyce persuasively frames the forgery project as just another part of a longstanding friendship.

Oddly enough, the titular demons barely matter to the story. William sees them, and we are as certain as one can be when dealing with a Graham Joyce story that they are real, but they never drive the present-day plot in any meaningful way. They serve instead as markers of personal suffering, grief, and depression, which William uses to better understand those around him. Even the earlier plotline is driven less by the demons than by stranger byproducts of William’s occult rituals. As in all of Joyce’s works, the characters simply experience the supernatural as part of their day-to-day lives.

I doubt anyone would rank this as Joyce’s finest or most ambitious work, but I don’t think he meant it to be. This was never intended to convey the horror of Dreamside, the poignancy of The Facts of Life, or the historical specificity of The Limits of Enchantment. This is an altogether jauntier piece of work. I can almost imagine Joyce viewing the writing of this work as a kind of vacation. Of course, since this is Graham Joyce we’re talking about, even that easygoing break has to include some demons.

[Maya Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most of Graham Joyce's novels, this is kind of a book about a middle-aged white man who can't understand why some of his kids and his ex wife get frustrated with him, or why things don't always work out for him in general. He considers himself such an upstanding British citizen, defending the underdogs and minorities while still managing to be the "cool parent" to his kids, that it's easy to imagine him coming across as insufferable, and this book as unending. In another author's hands it probably would have been. Somehow though, Joyce almost always manages to make his protagonists at least mildly likable. It helps that they're usually more narrators than actual conductors of the plot. Like Alice in Wonderland, Joyce's main characters tend to be people that things "happen to", rather than the ones who make things happen (I'm thinking of Smoking Poppy, whose bland protagonist is basically hurtled into an otherworld of drugs, spirits, and deities without really doing much). Obviously your mileage will vary, but as a chaotic person whose favorite book as a child was Through the Looking Glass, I'm here for it.

William's narrative voice is also pretty funny, and the events it recounts just as humorous, often verging on the absurd. This is the aspect that didn't work as well for me--these satirical moments combined with the darker magical elements and occasional cliffhangers that seem to be want to be chilling suggest that the book doesn't know what it wants to be about. We're leaping from demons lurking in the shadows to a mundane chapter about family tension and back to the skulking demons again. If I had to choose a preference I'd say the demons, having judged the book by its title. Unfortunately even in the demonic moments Joyce's writing becomes abruptly coy, pulling back and only describing these entities in the vaguest, most metaphorical of terms. They are "an essence hovering over" the people they attach to, William "senses the demon of love in the eyes" of a woman he's dating; this would have been fine once or twice but after awhile I wanted actual concrete details! What do these demons look like when they're not just clumps of shadow, or a general sense of...something? What makes them so malicious, considering they don't seem to actually do that much? The magical realism component makes us question how real these demons truly are, whether they're just sort of emotional auras. Not sure if it justifies the fact that the reader finishes the book without even feeling like they've actually SEEN these creatures.

(Except the section from Seamus' diary, which I really enjoyed, and which reminded me of Ahmed's djinn flashback in Joyce's other novel Requiem, but better fleshed-out).

RIP Graham Joyce

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

A charming but uneven urban fantasy. Joyce manages to squeeze a unique slant out of an overdone subject by focusing on the emotional landscape of his middle-aged, wine-soaked narrator. The result is an amiable, droll voice that is at times unexpectedly heartfelt about the human capacity for both suffering and change. The book relies heavily on multiple interwoven plots to drive the pace. This is handled with skill until we arrive at some of their conclusions; some of these story lines lack a satisfying payoff. Our mysterious love interest, for example, is dangled as an enigma for the entire book until she turns out to be just desperate to bestow her sexual favors on an older man who was nice to her. Once. Okay. That’s one particular genre of fantasy I’m a little tired of.

Joyce sometimes gets lost in clever sentences that end up as unfulfilled promises. A book that opens with: “There are one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven known demons” seems to guarantee a certain precision about the world we are being introduced to. But our narrator never goes into much detail about these demons he has supposedly cataloged — instead, we have to be content with a vague, possibly metaphorical resolution.

Despite some of these letdowns (not to mention some rough copy editing mistakes that you don't often see in a published book) Joyce’s writing remains sharp, funny, and intentional. Hopefully I can come across some more of his work in my local library.