"[1] A "hive" of eight bored wealthy women (who call themselves the "Bee-Women," with Regina the queen bee) thinks it would be fun to raise the Devil, so they begin dabbling in ancient satanic rituals — much of which Bester portrays through musical notation.

When he begins behaving oddly, taking midnight walks and losing chunks of his time to amnesia, the company brings in Gretchen Nunn, a blind woman who can "see" through the eyes of those around her, but can also can also see into parts of the spectrum beyond normal human ability.

Similarly, the way that Bester uses non-alphanumeric features of the keyboard, or straggles dialogue at different angles across the page, appears in others of his stories, most notably in his first novel The Demolished Man, in which Mr. Atkins spells his name @tkins, and the sentences in a conversation among telepathic people is displayed as a lattice of rights, lefts, ups, downs, and diagonals.

The Stars My Destination likewise brightens the text with spangles, asterisked (***) boxes, and colored phrases (green, red and indigo).

Bester's dialogue has always featured the hipster slang of the 1940s and '50s — or neologisms which suggest it — but here he adds stream-of-consciousness narration, new to his oeuvre since his short story "Fondly Fahrenheit."

)"[2] Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Outrageous, erratic, brilliant Bester is back — with a generous, ultimately unsatisfying mix of fantasy, occult, science-fiction, and psycho-babble...

There is much to be admired in this fantasy — its satire and spontaneity — but somewhere along the line the high spirits congeal into massive self-indulgence and an attractively literate talent slips into doggerel.

"[3] China Miéville described it as "an extraordinary, troublesome, sometimes sadistic work that will shock you with its grotesquerie and sexual violence, but also, with a less uneasy tremor, with its disrespect for text.

The images are the engine, organizing what language there is, invoking awe and, on the last page, an irruption of sudden textless terror... [a] nastily visionary S.F.