I’ve been reading John Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle, and no one writes a death scene better. I thought I would feel haunted forever reading Boney Rasmussen experiencing his own death in Love & Sleep, but now I’ve just read through the death of Dr. John Dee in Dæmonomania. I liked Boney’s death better (what an odd thing to say), because it seemed like how death might actually be, instead of some heavy-handed device in a story.
But the inexplicable shock at the end of Dee’s death, the confounding of narrator and narratee, disturbed and confounded me. It pulled a sincere “What the fuck?” right out of me, and I don’t often exclaim aloud when reading.
If you’ve never read Crowley, one thing you will simply not believe until you do is that every word on every page is perfect (though the book itself is not). There are no sloppy or hasty sentences. Every word is perfect in its place. I know my own word choices are not so meticulous. To find the exactly correct word that carries precisely the desired meaning, Crowley sends me to dictionary a few times for each book of his I devour.
