Like the rest of the Cornish Trilogy, the novel takes place in the same universe as the Deptford Trilogy, with the major characters Clement Hollier and John Parlabane being alums of Colborne College (the college where Dunstan Ramsay taught history in Fifth Business) and former classmates of Boy Staunton's son David.

The Rebel Angels follows several faculty and staff of the fictional College of St. John and Holy Ghost, affectionately referred to as "Spook".

The story, like many of Davies', is notable for very strongly drawn and memorable characters: The novel's narration alternates between Theotoky's and Darcourt's points of view.

Dave Langford reviewed The Rebel Angels for White Dwarf #45, and stated, "Not for the squeamish, it features a murder whose inventive nastiness makes the destruction of whole shiploads of the people in Downbelow Station pale into insignificance.

In a 1998 fact sheet about Roma in Canada, Ronald Lee wrote that in its wake, "media was carried away with the mythological, racist and stereotypical image of the Romani people created by Victorian writers, and perpetuated by such recent pundits of Canadian literature as the late Robertson Davies [in The Rebel Angels] where Roma were portrayed as magical, surrealistic, phantasmagoric, light-fingered, characters likely to pick the pockets of Canadians in general.