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Beware of the Diviners (by Rick Moody)

a book review by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com



Sometimes when you are on a roll, and the ideas for a story keep coming to you, awake or asleep, one of the worst things that can happen is you pick up a good book, one that grabs your imagination and won’t let you go, won’t let you get on with your own ideas until you’ve turned the last page.

The Diviners is such a book — too unpredictable to let sit, so memorable it clutters your mind with weird characters and unlikely events, all vividly portrayed. It’s a curse of a book.  That’s why I’m up at 2 AM writing this and knowing that I’ll have to read the final 40 pages of The Diviners before I can go back to bed.

The Diviners isn’t just a story — it’s half a dozen stories that happen simultaneously, and stories inside those stories. Moody is a huckster, like a movie agent.  While telling these stories, he is at the same time delivering a pitch for a collosal TV miniseries full of tales stretching from the days of Atilla the Hun to the foundation of Las Vegas. The outer stories deal with the people involved in creating this bizarre miniseries, and the stories inside, relating to a “currently running” TV drama about werewolves and to the projected miniseries are outrageous, ridiculous, and captivating. Imagine an old lady who hears other people’s cell phone conversatiosn in her head. Imagine a cabdriver in New York who, with no related experience, in a matter of weeks becomes the director of the key episodes of the miniseries. These characters grow on you, become real to you.  So real that you get up at 2 AM and have to read to the end…
 


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Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

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