How to Make Friends with Demons

Note! How to Make Friends with Demons was published as Memoirs of a Master Forger in the UK under the pseudonym of William Heaney. Memoirs of a Master Forger won the British Fantasy Award in 2009. Click here to see UK cover art.

William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family – his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter's new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu – nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons.

For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices.

After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters, with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney's life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and forgotten deceptions surface. Secrets threaten to become exposed. To weather the changes, William Heaney must learn one thing: how to make friends with demons.

Marked by his trademark lucid, flowing prose, powerful atmosphere, and impressive storytelling, Graham Joyce's How to Make Friends with Demons is an ambitious and captivating novel of emotional endurance and psychological horror.

Graham Joyce is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Facts of Life, Indigo, and The Stormwatcher. He lives in Leicester, England.

"Anyone who isn't reading Graham Joyce is doing themselves a huge disservice. No matter what kind of story he takes on, his work immediately becomes the standard to which all others have to be compared. The only disappointment with a Joyce book is that, at some point, it has to end." – Charles de Lint, the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Onion Girl.

"Beyond the wonderful clarity of line and inherent word-music that draws a reader into the story, qualities of Graham Joyce's writing we fans of his have come to expect, in his new novel, How to Make Friends With Demons, he performs a breathtaking juggling act of the literal and metaphorical to tell a serious/hilarious story of our time, for all time, about the nature of good and evil. Joyce is undoubtedly possessed by the Demon of Great Writing." – Jeffrey Ford