Demonic in Thought, by Joel Biroco

Demonic in Thought was created in an intense eleven-month haze of writing in 2009, following the author’s invocation of a demon to which he extended the invitation to write a book with him through possession states. The sense of hermetic isolation that comes across in this book is palpable. One gets a flavour of time drifting by dedicated only to the nightside of things. Demonic in Thought creeps up slowly on the reader, until suddenly it may dawn – the writer of these words is quite possibly genuinely unhinged.

The knowing aristocracy of the demonic – the devil has always been fond of words – disguises something seething in this book, a swirling malfeasance. Yet there are moments of simplicity and beauty that forget it all, the pure Zen spirit, charm and innocence, simply a journal recalling the days, and perhaps because of this the darkness is all the more seductive and assertive when it returns to centre stage, tempting the reader not simply to understand what is being said but to fall foul of it. There is a strange seamless quality, such that it is hard to tell when the demon starts to speak, but no mistaking when it is in full throttle.

Biroco’s notoriety as an experimental occultist precedes him, so there is no reason to think the demonic aspect is mere hyperbole, but rather a genuine voyage of discovery to see what the demonic might have to say through an intelligent symbiosis. The end result is a fractured narrative of inspired madness, a philosophy of darkness, a celebration of standing alone at the brink of the fading world.

261 pages in print PDF. (The later and shorter work The Subtle Abyss is related.)

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Revision – Oct 7, 2023, typo corrected.