Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous N

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdo

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth.— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy "But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh." — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose [Advanced Lafferty. What follows supplements my earlier post on the Laughing Christ and what Lafferty does with it in East of Laughter. The argument, in brief, is that East of Laughter rejects three