He worked meticulously to recreate Vienna of the 1920s and used architectural drawings and similar documents to describe locations in detail.
[1] Together with his novels The Lighted Windows (1950) and The Strudlhof Steps [de] (1951), The Demons portrays Viennese social life in the 1910s and 1920s, with the fall of the Austrian monarchy and its impact as backdrop.
The book portrays a large gallery of people, drawn from different urban locations and social groups.
Critics compared it to the works of Dostoevsky, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy and Honoré de Balzac.
[1] When it was published in English in 1961, Kirkus Reviews wrote that the book reconstructs "the whole texture and detail of a society" where the components "are welded together by astonishing, lucid perceptions of the most peripheral insights and relations".