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

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s line that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even says that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he gives the day of the week, which creates several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, so he would have remembered what he was doing that day. In the plausible postwar range, that date fell on a Frid

“In any case the Apollonius story is not just a series of ‘and thens’: it drives us on toward a conclusion which restates the theme of the opening. At the beginning Apollonius encounters a king who is living in incest with his daughter, so that his daughter is also his wife: at the end Apollonius himself is a prince united with his lost wife and daughter. The story proceeds toward an end which echoes the beginning, but echoes it in a different world. The beginning is the demo

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