Secret Satan, 2021 part 1

It’s that time again …

For the neophytes: Secret Satan is an annual round-up of books from throughout the year with a Strange Flowers feel, with familiar themes and hopefully some titillating new input combining to creat something that once dangerous, alluring and comforting, like a bondage dungeon with a breakfast nook. And it is almost guaranteed to have the least overlap with any other end-of-year book lists you will encounter.

In Germany we are in the dire fourth wave of what now appears to be a largely elective pandemic driven by the vaccine obstinacy of the usual mix of woo-woo merchants, morons, tinfoil milliners, Nazis, narcissists and your basic cousin who keeps WhatsApping you memes from a Kremlin bot. So THAT’S fun! Books, though; books won’t let us down.

For all its epochal crappiness and uncertainty, 2020 actually offered a healthy haul for our Satanic selection last year (see