This is not the best from [[Stephen Graham Jones]], but it's easily the most creative from him, and from the field of horror, which ticks up the rating. The structure of the book is essentially a screenplay with the descriptive narratives beefed up for readability. It follows a group of friends and colleagues from a hospital as they visit the childhood home of one of the group. They are terrorized by sentient, animated gargoyles with a taste for human blood. Or are they terrorized by one of their own who's gone mad? Bonus material in the form of [[David Foster Wallace]]-style footnotes cataloging cultural, film, and literary references in the narrative. There are three screenplays to cover a film trilogy (the 80s wants its platform back).

While the reading requires some patience and dedication, the overall effect is quite enjoyable. But, beware, that some work is required - missing for some of the other readers who've offered criticism here.

Recommended!!!!
4 bones!!!! ( )

This is a novel -- perhaps the novel -- for horror film fans.

The novel is broken up into three parts, each describing or retelling the events of a film in a horror trilogy. The trilogy is a franchise based on a slasher, or demons, or possessed coma patients, or something or other, in which sexed-up, boozed-up, and drugged-up twenty-somethings are being killed in pretty spectacular ways. There is no point in trying to determine who the killer is, because at various points in the re-generating narrative you'll be either wrong or right, and the twist ending is pulled from nowhere. As are all classic horror movie endings.

It's all in good fun. S G Jones knows what horror fans want, and why they want it, and boy does he give it to them. There is a lot of homage paid to well-known horror films, mostly overt references (stuff like "bursts out of his chest like in Alien", though that may not specifically have been one of them) and ... a ton of footnotes. Now, there are a few good jokes in the footnotes, but for the most part these are as heavy-handed as Tarantino trying to convince us in Deathproof that he's seen Vanishing Point. Like an American running a joke into the ground, the references are piled one on top of another, as if making some bizarre appeal to authority in order to establish the author's credibility. Or maybe it's a courtship ritual.

Without the footnotes, this would be a five-star novel that sums up, synthesizes, or perhaps even encapsulates the horror film genre up to the time of its writing (and, really, not much progress has been made since then). A bit silly, perhaps, a bit genre, definitely, but nonetheless an impressive feat. ( )

(Re-posted from http://theturnedbrain.blogspot.com/)

The problem with loving an unconventional book is that it's so hard to find other books like it. This is the problem with me and Mark Z. Danielewski's 'House of Leaves' (which I swear I'm going to review one day...). I feel like I'm on a constant quest to find books that move in the same circles as 'House of Leaves,' and what books I do find rarely come close. Like Stephen Graham Jones' 'Demon Theory,' for example.

I had really high hopes for this one. The thing I loved most about 'House of Leaves' was the faux film analysis that took up the bulk of it. 'Demon Theory' features a similar conceit. It operates both as an analysis of a fictional horror movie trilogy, but also as a rumination on the history of horror films.

This book has footnotes up the wazoo. Unlike in 'House of Leaves' the footnotes are all factually accurate, and actually really interesting. Well, interesting if you have more than a passing interest in horror and or films, that is. The problem was that instead of being on the bottom of the page, they were all listed in the back of the book. I'm a lazy reader guys, I couldn't be bothered flicking to the back of the book every five minutes. There were a lot of them, but I still think it would have been better to have them in the main text.

But that's a layout thing, and there's every chance that Jones had no control over it. As for what he did have control over... Things start in a promising enough way. It's Halloween, and a bunch o kids are at a party when one of them gets a phone call from his creepy diabetic mother. So it's off to a creepy, middle of nowhere farmhouse! Things, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, do not go well.

I don't know, maybe it's just that I went into the book expecting (hoping) to find a more subtle creepy brand of horror, but for the most part the over the topness of the books horror elements just had me rolling my eyes. Plus, the characters were insanely two dimensional. Which, ok, on the one hand I get it. Jones clearly went to great lengths to make his trilogy of fake demon movies feel exactly like a classic horror film, which included cardboard characters. But the difference between books and movies is that its just so much easier to create "real" characters in books. I feel like he really missed an opportunity with his mostly forgettable cast.

My other major gripe isn't entirely Jones' fault. I went in to this looking for a 'House of Leaves-esque' experience, and that's not what Jones' was trying to do. But still. 'House of Leaves' did not just offer up a line by line summery of the fake documentary it revolved around. It analysed it, it linked it to philosophic schools thought and compared it to other films and critiqued the film making techniques used. And if that sounds too pretentious and post-modern to be stomached, well, it kinda is. But I loved it! In Demon Theory the three movies it features are just given summaries, with no kind of depth. I feel like Jones wasted the 'analysing a fake movie' gimick a bit. Sure, it helped tie the narrative to the history of horror films that he also had going on, but I just wanted a lot more from it.

The plot of the fake movies themselves started out easy to follow and end up just completely batshit insane. I had almost no idea what was going on by the end, but lets be honest, that's how most horror movie franchises go.

I do think my reaction to this book was heavily influenced by my wish for a second 'House of Leaves.' So if you can go into it "blind," then you might get more out of it than me. ( )

One of the most gripping & befuddling reading experiences I had last year. And it is a great horror story too.

QUOTE: "'Ganzfeld,' Seri pronounces finally, in defeat, as if in explanation. Then talks down to them: 'It’s a German term. G-A-N-Z-feld. A documented, psychological phenomenon. When you’re deprived of sensory input for too long—say, institutionalized?—you begin to hallucinate ... see connections where there are none ... come up with theories for your personal demons, which you want to be real, not imagined.'" ( )

I don't really know how I feel about this book. Uneasy? Irate? Exuberant?

At points I felt bitterly disappointed after Stephen Graham Jones' brilliant collection of short stories that I read first.

In one way, the most interesting part about it are the copious footnotes so packed full of pop-culture references it can make a person dizzy.

The main story(ies) are written almost as a treatment for a screenplay - or perhaps a book for a musical. I'm note sure if it's intentional or not, but there were times that I wasn't always clear about what was going on. This I think, is taken care of by the epilogue. Don't read the epilogue first -- I think it would ruin the effect of the entire book.

I still don't know. Which ... is perhaps what is intended. I think that it did pull some sort of emotional response out of me, which is of course, what good art does. ( )