Publication Day for A Demonology of Desires!
Today is the release day for Joe Grim Feinberg’s debut novel, A Demonology of Desires: The Rejected Dissertation of the Notoriously Disgraced Folklorist Joseph Geistberg.
“Ever wondered what it would be like to do a PhD at Miskatonic University? Joe’s demented scholarship impeccably cites its sources while his narrator descends into a possibly worse kind of madness than your average academic. But his demons don’t whisper to us in the dark — they speak of us, and of the darkness we have built. They make deals, or help us deal with what is real but feels like it can’t be: grief, obsession, nightmares and dreams (of all waking persuasions). Come for the golems and witches — stay for a literal spectre of communism explaining dialectical immaterialism.”
Found in his apartment the morning of December 31, 2022, after he was taken to the hospital, Joseph Geistberg’s PhD dissertation appeared to be nothing of the sort. Were his personal accounts of pale mountain demons in Communist China, ghostly sky spirits in the South Pacific, suffocating hags in Slovakian villages, and nefarious experiments beneath the streets of Prague true? And why did so many of the women he claimed to encounter all have the same name?
A Demonology of Desires is a stunning work of fiction, “haunting in all the best ways, not just because of the dark tales it tells but also because of what it works in your soul as you read it” (Rhyd Wildermuth).
“Rich in style and deep in erudition, A Demonology of Desires immediately locates Feinberg in the illustrious tradition of Nabokov, Borges, Calvino and Cortazar. A wonderfully inventive, compulsively readable and brilliantly controlled feat of gothic imagination.”
A Demonology of Desires is available now in hardcover, paperback, and EPUB. Readers can also take advantage of our 20% off sale for all Sul Books titles until the end of May with code MAY2025.
Below is a second excerpt from Feinberg’s incredible work (read a previous excerpt here).
WATER WOMEN
WATER WOMEN (Geistberg pers. exp. 2021). In German, Wasserfrauen; Slovak, vodné baby. Spirits responsible for drownings.
The old mining families of Schmöllnitz, I have been told, live in fear of a water woman. In this respect, they are like the people of other nearby towns, where it is said that water women hide in the eddies of quick-moving Carpathian streams or rest in the motionless fens of low plateaus. They will sing with voices clear as running water. They will rise from the water with dripping hair, and slowly they will wipe the lilies and waterweeds and sandy mud and fallen hazel leaves from their skin. They pretend to believe that no one else is near, and they will swim or idly float in the direction of a poor young fisherman or noble huntsman. He will stop to listen and watch as she comes near. The forest will grow silent around him as she comes into the darkest shade of a willow growing beneath an aspen that grows beneath an alder. In their shadows, the surface of the water is black, and the depths of the water cannot be seen. The young man’s blood will rise as she turns her face and chest and feigns surprise and plunges below, only to raise her face again with a coquettish smile. And then she raises her shoulders, and then her arm, which says to him, come here. The world will believe the youth has drowned, but she will have granted him just what he desired, pulling him to the ecstatic nuptials of her home below. And she would have her reasons too. After all, she is the spirit of some unfortunate girl who drowned there some time ago; and who wants to lie forever in a murky pool alone?
I was told, however, by an informant in a nearby city, that in Schmöllnitz things were different. The water woman there did not steal handsome youths but helpless babies. A mother would turn her back near the banks of the stream, and when she looked again, in the place where her child had been there would be instead another child, uglier and sadder than her own. “Who are you?” she would ask, and the child would frown and sob. “Where is my child?” she would scream, and the new child would scream with her. She would run all over to look, but her baby would be nowhere. She would cry out in all directions, hurling imprecations against the water woman. But no one would reply.
The people of Schmöllnitz found only one way to get their children back. They would pick up a nearby stick and beat the child they had been given in exchange. Its skin would turn splotchy, covered in bruises. Its festering sores would open and bleed. Its matted hair would fill with sweat and tears. And the sound of its shrieks would reach even into the invisible depths of the stream, where the water woman had gone to live with her beautiful new baby. She would try to ignore the sounds. They were not her business anymore. She had a new child whom she was learning to love, and shouldn’t the parents in the living world be kind enough to care for the child she’s given them in exchange? But if the bereaved mother was persistent, the water woman would eventually give in. Her former child’s shrieks would grow unbearable. She would do anything to bring them to an end. She would wait until the mother’s back was turned again, and she would replace the beaten, moaning baby with the happy one whom she had snatched away.
In years past, the men of Schmöllnitz would come down to the stream in the evenings to bathe after dirtying themselves in the dust and ore of the mines. In the mornings they would descend again into the ground. Did one of them, perhaps, have a wife and child who waited by the brook one afternoon for his return? Might the child have crawled and rolled down the weedy banks to get a closer look at the white waters of spring, brimming with melted snow and the silvery, coppery, muddy wastewater of the excavations, which then carried her away? Did her mother jump in after her without a thought, only to be taken herself by the current and pulled beneath the rocks that would become the roof of her eternal home? Was she doomed to look each day upon the child, bloated and disfigured by its mother’s moment of inattention? Would she only watch, each day, how other mothers waited with their children for their exhausted husbands to come down and begin to smile, their pockets full of wages and sparkling from flakes of silver justly stolen from the boss? Or would the woman try to make things right again?
And why this difference between the stories in Schmöllnitz and those in the surrounding villages? Was there something in the psychology of an old mining town that makes it less romantic, less afraid of uncontrolled attraction than of the brute physical danger of water near a child? Or was there something in the quasi-matriarchy of a place where the men are stuck powerless under the earth, and the women run the day-to-day affairs, that makes the residents less afraid of a seductress than of motherly love gone out of control?
While on a fellowship in Prague (see GOLEMS), I went to Schmöllnitz to substitute my speculations on the origin of the local water woman legend with accounts given by the people there. I had taken my son with me. His mother had left a year before, and there was no one to look after him at home. Besides, he had recently learned to walk, and I thought it would be good for him to get out a bit in the mountain air.
We saw no husbands smiling as they rushed from the mines to their families, no mothers waiting eagerly for them to watch after and play with their children. No children rushing dangerously along any water’s edge.
We sat down on a little heap of rubble where water was trickling through the closed gate of an old mineshaft. I looked up at the church that sat majestically — its windows seeming to gaze at us like empty eyes — on a ledge that centuries ago had been cut into the hill. I looked at the sites of the old mint and theater, long since torn down, unpleasant reminders of lost glory after the mine was closed. Then I looked at the narrow railroad, now deprived of cars. Below the railroad was the stream, bloated with spring water tumbling on the rocks. I noted it all down.
I stopped the people in the street and asked, balancing my notebook and recorder in my hands, “Please, excuse me, could you tell me, do you know the stories of the local water woman?” I was met by irritated stares.
My son started running around me in circles, but he stopped when he saw a man glowering at us. I explained myself to the man. “I want to record what the people here say about the water woman. That’s what the recorder is for.”
“What do you want to know?”
“So you do know the old stories? See, in other places, the water women steal young men, but here in Schmöllnitz the water woman steals children. What could be the reason?”
“Maybe this isn’t a place for children.”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t explained right. What I mean is — is there some story behind it? A story about what could make someone steal a mother’s child? Or some explanation of why this mining town would tell these stories?”
A woman came up behind the man. “What does he want?”
“I was asking about the water woman. Do you know the stories? How do you explain her cruelty? What does it symbolize?”
The man and woman looked at each other. “If it’s cruelty you wanted to know about,” the woman said, “then don’t ask about the water woman.” She stopped to spit on the road. “Don’t ask either about any mining town.” She pronounced the last words with something between derision and envy. “I don’t see any mining town here anymore. Ask instead about that swine of a mine owner who closed the mine and took the money and made it so no one raises children here at all.”
The man nodded, his eyes darting about, as if he were afraid to speak too loud. “He’s come through all these mountains, buying things up and closing them down. Where do you live? He’s probably coming there soon too.”
I looked around. My son was gone. He’d gone off to play. Which way? The stream was just a few meters away. A flutter of panic went through me. I dropped my notebook and recorder and ran past the man and woman, toward the stream. I didn’t see him. The water was rushing violently over the rocks. I was about to shout his name when I felt something softly touching my fingers. I turned around. He was there.
I’d been asking for the wrong story, I realized. I’d been chasing the wrong demon. I held tightly to my son’s little hand.