John O'loughlin

From the Devil to God John O'loughlin First edition

Written on and off during the winter of 1980-81, this collection of short prose starts in a relatively literary fashion, with the account of a clandestine visit of a masseuse to a priest who can no longer cope with his celibacy, and ends in a profoundly futuristic manner with an account of evolutionary progress towards a definitive Beyond, as envisaged by a radical philosopher. In between, there comes a fairly balanced alternation between prosodic and philosophic subjects ... as we follow the voyeuristic pleasures of a man covertly watching his wife getting dressed from the comfort of his early-morning bed; explore the evolutionary revelations of a de Chardin-esque gnostic in the face of atheistic unbelief; witness the horror of a Mondrian-esque ascetic, whose rural day-trip out of London with some friends proves to be more unsettling than he had bargained for; and go beyond conventional concepts of the Millennium, as of Millennialism, with a revolutionary thinker who believes that only when human brains are artificially supported and sustained will there be any prospect of heavenly salvation of a definitive order.