"As disturbing and powerful as anything by Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut." --Michel Faber 

"Hermans is as alarming as a snake in the breadbin... hugely entertaining." -- The Scotsman

"A violent apotheosis without equal in modern literature. A sadistic universe that offers no room for escape." - Cees Nooteboom

"Unsurpassed in its stylistic precision, unsettling in its language, dialogue, atmosphere, humour." --Harry Mulisch

"[Hermans] granted me a silence in which I could hear this novel's voice in all its purity, in all the beauty of the unexplained and the unknown." --Milan Kundera 

'A literary tour de force." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Praise for Hermans' The Darkroom of Damocles:

"I didn't know more [than a few facts about Hermans or his life]. But that wasn't necessary to delight in his novel. Works of art are gnawed at by a frenzied pack of comments and facts and their din renders the singular voice of a novel or a poem inaudible. I finished Hermans' book with a sense of gratitude for my ignorance; it granted me a silence in which I could hear this novel's voice in all its purity, in all the beauty of the unexplained and the unknown. . . I dove into this novel, intimidated at first by its length, then surprised at having read it without stopping. Because this novel is a thriller, a long chain of events in which the suspense never lets up. The events (which take place during the War and in the years immediately after) are described in a dry, exacting manner, detailed but swift; they are terribly real, yet skirt the limits of plausibility. I was captivated by this aesthetic: a novel smitten with the real and at the same time fascinated by the improbable and the strange." -- Milan Kundera, Le Monde