Satan Wants Me [Paperback]

Robert Irwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2007

The summer of 1967 - the summer of "A Whiter Shade of Pale", "Mellow Yellow" and "Sgt Pepper". Peter is into path-working meditations, backwards causation, easy sex and drugs. There is acid on the streets and darker things are on the move.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Dedalus (October 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1903517583
• ISBN-13: 978-1903517581
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #618,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the comical side of the occult, May 1, 2006

By 

Mr. Sd Astbury "Wellington Kelly" (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Satan Wants Me (Paperback)

This is a classic read - original, funny, shocking and somewhat frightening in places. Un-put-down-able, a tale of a student in swinging 60's London whose chosen subject for his university dissertation is devil worship and the occult. He joins a secret society in the heart of London and details his experiences and training in the underworld. Somewhat comical at first and laced with sex and drugs; but the mood soon turns and you find yourself caught up in a real nightmare of Satan.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Never drop acid while pursued by Satanists, May 22, 2009

By 

Joseph Davis (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Satan Wants Me (Paperback)

Robert Irwin is the author of one of my favourite off-beat, phantasmagoric novels - 'The Arabian Nightmare', which I rank right up there with Gustav Meyrink's 'The Golem' and 'The Green Face', and with George MacDonald's 'Phantastes'. With themes including sex, Satanism, the Sixties, Rock and Roll, London, and drugs (lots of drugs), you might have thought 'Satan Wants Me' would have been a sure-fire bestseller. It was first published in 1999 but I don't recall it being a bestseller, at least not on this side of the Atlantic, and the reason might be that it has a fatal flaw, disqualifying it from bestsellerdom -it is written too well. A novel with such a lurid title surely promises legions of scaly, over-wrought red demons and other tenebrous denizens of the sub-sub-basement, or perhaps serial exorcisms of nubile nymphets due to multiple Mephistophelian possessions at a girl's school combined with an invasion of infernal, bestial field mice? No, sorry. No wavy daggers. And not a baby sacrifice to be found. No humourless, homicidal albino monks either. What we do have is a very good and ultimately unsettling story, cleverly written in the form of a diary. I like this point of view when it is done well because, while it is intimate and really puts the reader inside the head of the protagonist, it is also circumscribed -you are largely limited to just one perspective and you are reading about events after the fact. You are not only limited by how the writer of the diary is limited in seeing the world, you are limited by what the writer wants to tell you. This perspective forces you as the reader to work -to put together the pieces of an incomplete puzzle and guess at what the missing ones might be.

The story is about a shallow, confused, hip young man working on his graduate thesis in London in 1967. He and his girlfriend become involved with an occult group that takes itself very seriously indeed. About a third of the way through the book, I thought I knew exactly where everything was heading and that I could predict the ending. I was quite wrong. Although there is an abundance of humour in this tale, its overall effect was unsettling on a number of levels. Uncanny events are believably portrayed. There are parts that I found genuinely disturbing.