Ilkka Mäyrä has written an absorbing and authoritative investigation of the role of demons and the demonic in literary and cultural history in the West. He draws impressively and with assurance on a wide range of theological, anthropological and philosophical sources to underpin and direct his analysis of a number of contemporary cultural texts. Rather than attempting to derive an underlying core of meaning from the shifting and polymorphous functions of devils and demons, Mäyrä argues suggestively that the demonic has come to embody uncertainty of identity and indeterminacy of meaning themselves. This makes the demonic a carrier of some of the most absorbing and widespread preoccupations of contemporary texts and cultural theory, and helps explain the stubborn survival of demons and demonism in contemporary writing. In the contemporary texts he discusses, from popular fiction such as Rosemary´s Baby and The Exorcist through to the novels of Anne Rice, Clive Barker and Salman Rushdie, Mäyrä finds the demonic at work within the idea of discourse itself. Most recently, the demonic has become a powerful explanatory metaphor for our increasingly complex relations with machines and technology. Historically well-informed, theoretically resourceful, critically subtle, this is an original and absorbing investigation of its topic.

Steven Connor

Professor of Modern Literature and Theory

Birkbeck College, University of London