What do You think about Daemonomania (2001)?
Like the two previous books in the Aegypt series, this one is monumental, riveting, exasperating. I rarely read books twice, but I have a feeling I am going to be reading this series again sometime, because so much eluded me the first time. Crowley's oblique, evocative, tantalizing style keeps you hooked but in the end I felt frustrated, wondering if I'd missed clues I should have picked up. To take just one example, what was the "quiet question" that Beau Brachman, posing as Jesus, puts to the
—Vicky
I got stuck in the middle of this one for a long time, but once I came back and focused on it, it went by very quickly.In some ways, the Aegypt series still feels tremendously unfocused. It is united by the new age magic and world-organizing principles that everyone in the book finds, guided by an endless supply of gurus (Cliff, Ray, Beau, even Pierce in his own way). There is no ideology, of course - in a Crowley novel, everything is about feeling and intuition, and the attempt to fit anything into an evidence-based logical order would burst all the bubbles. (view spoiler)[In a sense, this is the chief conflict of Daemonomania, since Pierce's distress over Rose's conversion centers on his unwillingness to let her believe the absurdities he spends so much time studying. (hide spoiler)]
—Adam
The scope of this quartet of novels is magnificent and awe-inspiring. This third book in a tetralogy (The Aegypt Cycle) requires you to have read the first and second, to an even greater degree than many other series. If you've read the first and are debating reading the second, see my review here on Goodreads: here The date I read this is approximate, but I'm sure it was within a few months of the release of the hardcover in the U.S. I had read the first and second books in paperback (the first in 1989 or 1990). At that time, I had no idea this would be a 20-year project for author John Crowley.
—Mindy McAdams
