New words from The Devil You Know

So it's interesting how fast a thing can pass through the cultural grinder turning it into pollen that sticks and shows up everywhere until you are sick of it. So fast. Vampires-urg, no more (except for True Blood.) Zombies? Sick of em and I never thought I'd see that day. I'm even starting to run out of steam on The Walking Dead and it just started. I still want to read the graphic novels though.

Anyways, what supernatural junk food is left? Yup,  demons and the devil. Louis Cyphre. Captain Howdy. I started reading Mike Carey's The Devil You Know which is equally about ghosts and loup-garou. I'm not actually sure if Shaytan makes an appearance in this but that's ok.

I'm surprised by how many things I had to look up in the first two chapters. To whit:

• fly tipping: this is what they call illegal dumping in Britain. 
• paletot: obviously a man's overcoat from the context but I thought it was something special. Nope, just an overcoat. And the final "t" is silent just like you'd think
• tricoteuse: technically this is French for a female knitter but it generally refers to women like Madame Dufarge who knitted during guillotine time during the Revolution. I thought this was just something Dickens whipped up. Who knew? It was a whole social movement of women who started out marching because they were pissed over bread prices. The people loved them. Then, like everything else in the French Revolution, they got scary. Rejected by their own revolution. Like the Red Guards. 
• Asmodeus, who possesses one character, isn't just made up by Carey. He is mentioned in the Talmud and in the Catholics-only Book of Tobit and the Kabbalah. In the Pseudoapocrypha, there is a story that Solomon tricks a demon into building his Temple. That demon was Asmodeus. Jewish mysticism-you gotta love it. Christianity is so freaking boring.

I also like how he refers to himself being compelled to complete an errand like "Ulysses tied to the mast." I think I'd like to go back and read his Hellblazer comics.