The Devil's Caress

This is a book you'll read in one sitting and go back to, rereading favorite passages like you'd replay favorite songs. --Ana Marie Cox, Mother Jones Pop culture obsessives will hear echoes of all sorts in Joy's voice--ecstatic art seraphs Patti Smith and Allen Ginsberg, Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs--not to mention the wild cadences of crank religious missives . . . It makes you lust for a world of heightened feelings and values beyond the one we live in--just like art is supposed to do. --Will Hermes, Guerrilla writer Camden Joy is a unique voice--a weird amalgamation of social critics like Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus who have used rock and roll as their lens, and writers like Geoff Dyer, Nicholson Baker, and Frank O'Hara . . . His moral seriousness--which rarely deflects his sense of humor--ignites his lyric imagery- and linguistic virtuosity. Hero worship, celebrity, the dialectic between art and commerce all inform his work. --Jon Garelick, Boston Phoenix [Joy writes with] a hyperventilating, loose-gasket appreciation of popular culture, from the autobiographical POV of an addict, a jilted lover, or a music fan who loves too much . . . Perhaps he defines a new critical beast: the rock critic as stalker. --Richard Gehr, SPIN Joy relates his ode to squandered youth and perfect pop songs in a flurry of words and excited digressions. Some of the flashbacks to an adolescence suffused with rock and roll and fizzled gestures of rebellion are truly funny . . . Joy emerges as a spectacularly energetic writer. --Publishers Weekly