The Devil Notebooks

Description

Milton's Paradise Lost. Goethe's Faust. Aaron Spelling's Satan's School for Girls? Laurence A. Rickels scours the canon and pop culture in this all-encompassing study on the Devil. Continuing the work he began in his influential book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels returns with his trademark wit and encyclopedic knowledge to go mano a mano with the Prince of Darkness himself.

"Laurence A. Rickels's punning, associative, and extravagant style serves not only to refresh material worked over by critics for a century but also pulls the reader along in a way we'd expect more from summer beach reading than from literary criticism. This shouldn't be surprising, however, since with its narrative of desire, projection, and denial The Devil Notebooks is every bit a romance." -Daniel Punday, author of Narrative Bodies "The Devil Notebooks establishes the astonishing extent to which contemporary pop culture has been deeply preoccupied with demons, succubi, possession, aliens, sexuality of all kinds, and the end of the world. The Devil, then, offers up a counter-history of humankind-a history from below as it were-that Rickels deploys with verve in a truly fascinating and important study of how and why the world as we know it has gone to Hell." -Michael Dorland, Carleton University