Today, an Argo Atlas, to be combined with a Coscuin Atlas at some point. As I put it together, I thought it would be fun to mention some connections between Finnegan and Dana Coscuin, too. Readers who come to The Devil is Dead without having read the Coscuin Chronicles meet a character named Angela Cosquin in chapter seventeen. She is a Basse-Terre barmaid with an odd last name, and the reader learns that her father drew treasure maps for confidence men. Nothing in the novel

My working theory is that the best chronological anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” Yet he does something unusual: he gives the day of the week, thereby creating several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. Within the plausible postwar range, November 7

Finnegan had the barrel of the rifle in his hands. Then he had Saxon Seaworthy in his hands, far underwater in a turmoil. Saxon did not die easily or willingly. To lull the grip he went limp as though already gone. Then, thirty seconds later, he erupted with violent writhing so as to break away. It was not easy to throttle a man with so sinewy a neck that was also protected by the pherea , the throat protuberances of an old satyr: and to choke off the air of a man already und

Today, something interesting, although it falls into a niche within a niche within a niche. In other posts, I have written about how Lafferty uses E. I. Watkin’s 1932 work The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience to create Barnaby Sheen stories. What I tried to do is go deeper than just observing that Lafferty color-coded stories by theme because the more interesting thought is how and why he did this. If you haven't read any of that, Watkin’s boo

A Note on This Post I am leaving this post as it stands. When I saw the depth of Lafferty’s views on Jews, I began to see his work differently. The clearest sign is that he omitted the Holocaust from a book he called a complete history of the twentieth century. There are smaller indicators too: the rabbi blessing pork in "Bright Flightways," a story I otherwise admire, or the Zionist in "Forty-Seventh Island.” One could easily trace a trail of such clues. What surprised me mo