Vit Babenco's Reviews > The Angel of Darkness

“And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.” Revelation 9:11
Conditionally Angel of Darkness may be called Ernesto Sabato’s autobiographical novel – there he is just another, partly fictional character interacting with the other fictional characters and standing against the legion of darkness.

…I’m not talking about the figure of the writer inside the fiction. I’m talking about the possibility of the extreme cases, in which it’s the author of the novel that’s inside the novel. Not as an observer, though, or a chronicler, or a witness… As just another character, the same sort of character as all the rest…
The author would be a man maddened, somehow, and living with his own doubles, aspects of his own self.

The novel is an elaborate and profound contemplation on the nature of evil and its manifestation, personification and undivided power over man through mass media, politics, religion, occultisms and literature…

“I told you once that poets are invariably on the side of the demons, even though they don’t always know it themselves, and I noticed that you didn’t agree with me… That exaggeration is Blake’s, but never mind – I repeat it all the time, there must be some reason for that.”

In the contemporary society, evil takes the most unusual and twisted forms so we live amongst the bigots possessed by evil…
Our existence in the modern world is similar to “a sinister carnival – amongst the jesters dressed in motley there are some real monsters.”
He who searches for the absolute will be lost in the labyrinths of evil… Demons will lead him astray.