Daemonomania
By John Crowley
Bantam Books

Reviewed by John Hanlon

Let me see if I can explain it. You’re walking down the street, and it begins to rain, hard, and you don’t have an umbrella. You don’t mind walking in the rain sometimes, but this time it’s a little cold and you don’t feel like getting wet. So you say, quietly, "Dear God, please make it stop raining." And then the rain stops. How would you interpret this?

Do you think that there is no connection between your request and the rain stopping? That it is all coincidence, the rain would have ended anyway, and you just happened to wish it at that moment? Or do you think that "God," some agent outside of yourself, heard your request and granted it? Do you assume that there is some power beyond us, with a control over things in our world, that we can communicate with, plead with it, and that it can act on our behalf, but that it makes the final decision? Or, do you think that "God" is something we’ve been taught to believe in, but you, as an individual, can effect change beyond yourself? That you have some power, perhaps undeveloped, that lets you control the physical world through your will? How is the world made?

Perhaps a combination of these three scenarios guides our world. Events are sometimes based on coincidence, sometimes on a supreme being’s will, and sometimes on our own will. It wouldn’t matter if this was only about stopping the rain, but such events revolve around more important things. "Coincidences" form a major part of our most lives: who we love, where we live, what we do for a living, how we die. I’ve never prayed for it to stop raining, but I have found that events sometimes move according to my wishes or desires in a way that is a little...eerie. It only takes one or two life changing coincidences to...well..."make you philosophical" is a nice way of putting it, but "fuck you up" is a more accurate description. "Daemonomania" is about people in a small town and their "philosophical" pursuits. Pierce Moffat is a college professor who, in his mid-thirties, has left New York City for a small town. Pierce is interested in magic, and believes in an alternate theory of history. History runs in cycles, and once a new cycle has begun, everything about the previous cycle is gone and can barely be remembered, let alone understood. Pierce believes that in the 1600’s, people were able to work real magic. It was the physics of its day. The physical world was governed by different rules than ours is. When that era ended, magic could no longer work, and the evidence that it did work is mostly gone. Pierce thinks that he is currently living through the end of another era, and can somehow effect what is to come. Towards that end, he is working on a book about these shifts in history, and practicing sex magic with his girlfriend, Rose Ryder.

Rose, meanwhile, has fallen under the sway of the Powerhouse, a born-again Christian cult that is gaining more and more influence in the town. They believe in the power of God and that anything you wish for can be gotten by prayer. The Powerhouse is currently convincing another disciple, Mike Mucho, that his daughter’s epilepsy can be cured by prayer rather than medication. What we have are two opposing ideas: organized religion versus individual belief; praying to God versus influencing events yourself. Through Crowley’s beautiful elliptical language, you understand that it is not just the health of Mike’s daughter or the soul of Pierce’s girlfriend that’s at stake, but the direction of the world as another of history’s cycles draws to a close. The novel is not as simple as "Born Again Christians are bad, eccentric occultist professors are good." Late in the novel, Pierce panics and begins to suspect that his attempts at magic have not just damaged himself or Rose, but the World itself?sort of like a kid playing with a chemistry set who doesn’t know what he’s doing and doesn’t understand the destructive power in his hands. Pierce might be heading towards a break down...or becoming a true magician (same thing?), which means rejecting our era’s notions of cause and effect.

There’s more to the book than the conflict between organized and individual belief systems. What amazes me is the way Crowley blends the mundane with the cosmic to create a gnostic soap opera. He pays as much attention to the daily events of life--parties, cars that don’t work, job worries, lovers coming together and breaking up--as he does with more cosmic events. A powerful wind blows through town. Is this a portent of a change in the world, or just an odd weather pattern? Mike’s wife loses custody of their child because she goes to the wrong room at the courthouse and misses the hearing (a heartbreaking scene). Is this God’s will, moving on behalf of those who prayed to him, or a coincidence? How do you view the world? I hesitate to add that this book is actually the third in a series of four, because I don’t want to dissuade anyone from reading it--just the opposite, in fact. "Aegypt" and "Love and Sleep" were the first two, and are sadly out of print. Crowley does an admirable job of explaining what has happened before and what the relationships between various characters. This exposition helps?it has been about six years since I read the previous book in the series. Even though you sense it is part of something larger, "Daemonomania" can be read on its own. As long as it is read.