Satan Wants You – Arthur Lyons
Mayflower – 1972 (First published 1970)
I’ve probably read enough books about the history of witchcraft and Satanism, but this book is called Satan Wants You, and it has a naked babe drinking out of a human skull on the cover.
The first part of the book is the history of the Devil, witchcraft and the Black Mass. This was fine, but I don’t think I learned anything that I didn’t know already.
The second part of the book is a sociological analysis of Satanism. This book was written during the late 1960s, and Satanism back then was quite different to what it is today. The Church of Satan had only been operating for a few years, and none of the other Satanic groups discussed here are mentioned by name. I assume the approach of sociology has also changed quite a bit since this book was written. Honestly, the latter half of this book is outdated and extremely dull.
Satan Wants You is only 170 pages long, but it’s so boring that it took me a couple of weeks to force myself through it. It would be of interest to a person researching what people in the late 60s/early 70s thought about Satanism, but there are plenty of more accurate and/or more entertaining books on the same topic.
As I was writing this post, I started to wonder how many books on this subject I’ve read. I looked through my index page and realised it was more than I remembered.
Nocturnal Revelries 