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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sex, Drugs and Satanic Lore..., 21 Nov 2000
I bought this book after reading Irwin's "Arabian Nightmare" and being very impressed by the mix of erudition, atmosphere and deft storytelling. While this novel is perhaps not quite so assured (Irwin is, apparently, a scholar of Arabic history), it is still an excellent read, full of dark portents and hints of deeper mysteries which kept me turning the pages well into the night. Unlike The Arabian Nightmare - which is a story of different stories that sometimes advance and sometimes hinder the main plot - Satan Wants Me is written in diary form. While this technique can sometimes be constrictive to an author, Irwin uses this format in a playfull and highly engaging manner - making it almost a character in the story in its own right. For this is a diary which (in a perverse inversion of the usual nature of a diary as a private repository of personal feelings) is meant to be read: it is one of the exercises which the "Black Lodge" he has joined require of him. Twice a week his journal is read by his satanic mentor, and it's contents are mintutely criticised. I think this is the strongest point of the book - the main character is selfish, spiteful, immature; utterly unsympathetic, and yet you do feel for sorry for him as you wince at the honesty of what he writes, knowing as you do that it will soon be read by someone else (often by the person he is actually writing about). Which brings me to the main element of this book - it is very, very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. It is at once deeply serious and deeply farcical, erudite yet with a lightness of touch which makes it both unsettling and hilarious at the same time. In short, a book well worth reading. Some nice twists in it too. I'll finish with a paraphrase which summed up the tone of the book - "Perhaps it was the Methedrine coursing through my system which made the streets of London seem like a nexus of satanic possibilities. A crossroads of spiritual development. One road led to life, another to death. A third led to life-in-death. And the fourth led to the Post Office." Great stuff. Buy and enjoy.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Weird. Well written., 11 July 1999
By A Customer
Kinda weird this. Summer of '67 well evoked. I loved the passage where Johnny Kidd [late of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates] acts as Virgil conducting the protagonist through the lower regions of the Inferno. Acid trip induced wouldn't you know! Anyhow they encounter Russ Conway playing The Moonlight Sonata. Hell indeed!!
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Robert Irwin is a scarily clever writer, 3 Sep 2001
Great plot; superb, vividly drawn, fascinating, varied characterisations; clear, effective prose; marvellous, sick, immature, self-centred bad behaviour; the blackest of black humour; genuinely innovative story structure (the diary format referred to by the other reviewer is by turns the instrument and the subject of many of the plot developments - very clever). I love when you get that feeling that "someone has been here ahead of me" when you're reading a book - little things that are put in early on and their significance only revealed much later so that you get that "ohmigod" deja-vu feeling - this has loads of those. The prose is full of marvellous little pearls you wish you'd thought of yourself: "there is a methedrine to our madness" (on his rationale for something they did on an acid trip) and lots lots more. Buy it. I'm getting Arabian Nightmare next. Just one thing Robert, you go DOWN the hill from the station to get to the Maltings! :-)
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