Daemonomania
John Crowley's powerfully mysteriousDæmonomaniaadds flesh  to the world he imagined inÆgyptandLove and Sleep. In this book,  as in all his books, Crowley transports faithful readers to a place where time,  place, and meaning come unstuck. It is in some ways the story of the end of the  world as it might be, or might have been, a novel of history, eschatology, and  faith with unforgettable characters and hauntingly lovely sentences. If the  world's end is neither bang nor whimper but "like the shivers that pass over a  horse's skin," how is it perceived by the people living through it?Historian Pierce Moffett finds his key to understanding in New York state's  Faraway Hills, as do his lover, Rose Ryder, and single mom Rosie Rasmussen,  whose daughter seems to suffer from dæmonomania--spiritual possession by  Renaissance magician John Dee. Each character must pick a careful path between  the colliding juggernauts of past and present, magic and mundane. The wind of  apocalypse is blowing:"Scary wind.... What if it's the one?" she said."What one?" he said.... He in fact knew what one, for it was from him that she  had heard mythologies of wind, how it bloweth where it listeth, one part of  Nature not under God's thumb and therefore perhaps at the disposal of our Enemy;  she had heard his stories about changer winds, how one had once blown away the  Spanish Armada and thus saved England from Catholic conquest, a famous wind  which if you went to look for it in the records of the time wasn't there.In typical Crowley style, magic is seamlessly woven into the narrative. Pierce  is writing the story of the end of the world while it happens, Rose joins a cult  that promises salvation, and Rosie inherits a spooky legacy that might hold the  secret to saving her daughter. All are involved in deep exchanges of power, and  all must yield to what Crowley calls the "queasy pressure of Fate."Crowley describesDæmonomaniabest when he writes about Pierce's  book: "The book... was about magic, secret histories, and the End of the World,  an event that Pierce would suggest was under way undetectably even as he wrote,  as the reader read." This is a complex, disturbing, and beautiful book, one that  will bear rereading. Crowley's writing is gorgeous in places, frustrating in  others, but always irresistible.--Therese Littleton