Practical Demonkeeping

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A man named Travis summons up a demon when he's 19 and is unable to send it back to where it came from. As a consequence he hasn't aged a day since 1919. Catch, the demon, can't be banished because Travis lost the incantations and Travis has to deal with all the problems that demonkeeping entails. In the present day, a Djinn is trying to get ahold of Catch, which causes even more problems on top of Travis' current ones.

The first published novel written by Comic Literature writer Christopher Moore

Tropes used in Practical Demonkeeping include:


  • The Alleged Car: Travis' Impala. A large part of the car's utter shittiness is due to Travis himself. He literally drives it into a ditch just to annoy Catch.
  • And I Must Scream: Catch is punished by being chained to a rock and having an eagle fly down and eat his liver every day. Brine lampshades the fact that it sounds a lot like Prometheus' punishment. Gian Hen Gian Hand Waves this by saying that the"" Greeks were thieves, no better than Solomon"".
  • Asshole Victim: Catch can't always be stopped from eating people, so Travis naturally tries to get him to eat pimps and drug dealers rather than say, babies and sweet old ladies.
  • Crossover Cosmology: Gian Hen Gian, the Djinn, has a backstory that includes aspects from Greek, Arabian and Christian mythology.
  • Curse of the Ancients: "By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man!"
  • Decoy Protagonist: The first chapter is told from the viewpoint of a man called The Breeze. Then Catch eats him.
  • Epigraph: There's one at the beginning of the novel quoting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
  • Fallen Angel: Demons were formerly angels, this includes Catch.
  • Fish Out of Temporal Water: Catch and Gian Hen Gian. Gian believed that he was seeing an actual genie the first time he is exposed to a movie.
  • For the Evulz: Catch.
  • Four Lines, All Waiting: The book is notorious for its rather convoluted plot.
  • Genie in a Bottle: Gian Hen Gian was trapped in Solomon's jar for centuries before being fished out of the sea.
  • He Who Must Not Be Named: Speaking Travis' name has no actual consequences, but those who he's associated with tend to call him the dark one.
  • Humans Are Flawed: Humans are implied to have been created to piss off Satan and the other fallen angels... by the sheer inferiority and absurdity.
  • Invisible to Normals: Catch, under most circumstances.
  • It Gets Easier: Travis hates that Catch has to continually eat people, but he gets used to it.
  • Kid with the Leash: Travis.
  • Jerkass God: Most of the things that God does are for the sole purpose of pissing off various people.