DeMarinis, Rick
Entry updated 27 May 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1934-2019) US author whose first novel, A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of Claude Rains and Dr Tellenbeck (1975), applies a sharply fabulistic eye (see Fabulation) to Southern California through the lens of a revisionist take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols), though in this case the Frankenstein Monster is named. Assembled from organs which impose shattered memories on him, the "neo-frankenstein meta-man" Claude Rains gradually falls apart after the death his maker; his imitating of numerous Television versions of the monster is unhelpful. Scimitar (1977), set in a similar region of California, is an anatomical Satire of the panicky responses of urban America to the imploding Near Future. Cinder (1978), contrastingly, celebrates an old man's last days, which he spends (in every sense) in the company of a genie, also ageing and also determined to seize the day. The stories assembled in Jack & Jill: Two Novellas and a Story (coll 1979) hover at the edge of sf, as do some of the contents of Under the Wheat (coll 1986), notably the terrifying title story and "Weeds"; The Coming Triumph of the Free World (coll 1988); and Apocalypse Then: Stories (coll 2004). Some of DeMarinis's middle-period novels avoid any Equipoisal drift into the larger realms of the fantastic, though later novels such as A Clod of Wayward Marl (2001) or the absurdist Mama's Boy (2010) reflect the whole range of his career, as he continued to interrogate the margins of the mundane. [JC]
Rick DeMarinis
born New York: 3 May 1934
died Missoula, Montana: 12 June 2019
works (selected)
- A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of Claude Rains and Dr Tellenbeck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975) [hb/Lawrence Ratzkin]
- Scimitar (New York: E P Dutton, 1977) [hb/Janet Halverson]
- Cinder (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978) [hb/Fred Marcellino]
- A Clod of Wayward Marl (Tucson, Arizona: Dennis McMillan Publications, 2001) [hb/Michael Kellner]
- Mama's Boy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010) [pb/Christopher D Salyers]
collections
- Jack & Jill: Two Novellas and a Story (New York: E P Dutton, 1979) [coll: hb/Janet Halverson]
- Under the Wheat (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986) [coll: hb/Margot Barbour]
- The Coming Triumph of the Free World (New York: Viking, 1988) [coll: hb/Bascove]
- The Voice of America: Stories (New York: W W Norton and Company, 1991) [coll: hb/Bascove]
- Borrowed Hearts (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999) [coll: hb/]
- Apocalypse Then: Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004) [coll: hb/Stewart Cawley]
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