Review of William Demby's The Catacombs

      Jan 2026:

Just finished William Demby's, The Catacombs. Written in 1965, it was largely forgotten and not republished until recently by Vintage Books. Demby is an interesting underrated writer who deserves to be looked at once again. He is more famous for this work, Battlecreek, which I haven't yet read.

At first, Catacombs was a bit of a mystery to me. I didn't know how to take it. Then I read it was a work of Meta-fiction and that cleared up everything. It then made sense. To be honest, I found it an intriguing way of writing at first, but that quickly wore off. After a while, the constant interruptions (the endless newspaper headlines or other spurious comments) proved too much of a distraction to keep my interest. Don't get me wrong, there are some brilliant passages. However, the tense is often short lived. Sometimes the comments about local events and the literary comments were interesting, other times they were not.

In the end, for me it was, a mixed bag. Look forward to reading Battlecreek, however.