Showing Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin

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