Daemon is a hallucination born from the mind of the young Mary Shelley/Alexia Sarantopoulou, daydreaming as she wanders through woods and mist. Suddenly, she catches sight of this strange creature moving swiftly, dancing at an imaginary rave, crying out in rage and terror… She enters into dialogue with it. Hallucinations brought on by the damp climate and the relentless rain of that “Year Without a Summer,” perhaps?

Daemon tells the story of that terrible click that transforms love into hatred, benevolence into violence; of the breakdown in the machinery of affection that triggers a reversal with irreversible consequences. It focuses on the creature’s “becoming evil”: on how a being without identity, without history, solitary as a hunted deer, creates a world of its own and rebels, setting fire to the house it once loved.

Fire—which is a recurring motif throughout this Promethean novel—ultimately invites us to recognize the transformative and insurgent power of anger, as the first gesture, the first mode of response to an anthropocentric system that is crushing every nonconforming voice.