Book description
Sex, drugs, satanism, rock and roll and the 1960s. 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 He
is a first-rate, startling novelist; Satan Wants Me and Exquisite
Corpse, are both about the irruption of exotic intellectual movements
- Satanism and surrealism - into the calm procession of English life.
Both could be wonderfully funny books, but are always fascinatingly
tempted by the possibility of becoming something bigger, blacker, more
quietly distressing. Philip Hensher in The Spectator 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
