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Book Cover for: Satan Wants Me., Robert Irwin

Satan Wants Me.

Robert Irwin

Satan Wants Me is a novel for anyone who wants to know what it was like to be young in the 1960s ... amphetamines, weird sex and Devil-worship.

'... the Lodge requires him to find a new partner, and they make him fill in the dating agency form that leads to Maud, one of the more memorable characters in recent fiction. Peter's initial contempt for Maud as a straight and boring hairdresser soon gives way to a kinky menage a trois, in which Sally eagerly dons a dog collar and frilly apron and has herself tattoed with the words 'I am Sally, the slave of Maud and Peter'. So extraordinary is Maud, in fact, that she has more than a little to do with the title of the book...... No doubt this contributes to the feel of Satan Wants Me as something to relish and curl up with, capable of inducing sensations rarely felt by people who have to read novels as work. With darkness outside and a drink to hand, I lay back on the sofa in the happy knowledge that I still had half of the book to go. Ah yes, I thought. This is the life.'
Phil Baker in The Times Literary Supplement

'Irwin is a writer of immense subtlety and craftmanship, and offers us a vivid and utterly convincing portrait of life on the loopier fringes of the Sixties. Satan Wants Me is black, compulsive and very, very funny.'
Christopher Hart in The Daily Telegraph

'Irwin's writing is witty and scabrous but it is also subtle in a way that keeps catching the reader out. The blend of the fantastical with the philosophical has been the defining characteristic of Irwin's fiction and in Peter's drug-drenched, satan-haunted diary, it has found its perfect expression.'
Tom Holland in The New Statesman & Society

'Part of the book's fertile comedy stems from the ironic interweaving of the jargons of sociology, hippiedom and magick. It is hard to resist a pot-head mystic who hopes the Apocalypse will come on Wednesday because it will break up the week.'
Tom Deveson in The Sunday Times

Book Details

  • Publisher: Dedalus
  • Publish Date: Feb 14th, 2020
  • Pages: 320
  • Language: English
  • Edition: Revised - 0002
  • Dimensions: 7.70in - 5.00in - 1.00in - 0.70lb
  • EAN: 9781912868209
  • Categories: Occult & SupernaturalLiteraryHorror - General

About the Author

Irwin, Robert: - Robert Irwin (born 1946) is a novelist, historian, critic and scholar. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
He is the author of eight novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997), Satan Wants Me (1999) Wonders Will Never Cease (2016) and My Life is Like a Fairy Tale (2019).

Praise for this book

'Robert Irwin's Satan Wants Me was a mad confection of black magic and 60s sexual liberation, a paranoid fantasy that drew heavily on the legacy of Aleister Crowley, but achieved a wonderful lightness of touch.'
Alex Clark in The Guardian's Books of the Year
'Truly wonderful, one of my books of the year.'
Suzi Feay on Open Book BBC Radio 4
The brilliant Satan Wants Me is a seductively plotted novel that will sink its tainted claws into you and refuse to let go. A profoundly unwholesome read, charting the progress of a young sorcerer through the grades of the Black Light Lodge during the Summer of Love.
Luke Jennnings in The Observer