A demon-haunted year of reading

I didn’t set out to spend 2023 reading about demons. I selected books that clustered around authors or ideas I wanted to understand better. Demons were not among them. But as I look back on the last twelve months of reading, I see demons in various guises lurking on nearly every page. The personal crises of the narrators in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (read in December 2022), are punctuated by a series of progressively uncannier events, beginning with the appearance of the titular star and culminating in the arrival of a flesh and blood demon.…