Demons
"When I didn't know exactly what was going on [...] I admit that I have not hesitated to make it up." -- Sprant Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti (in a different book)
Demons! The hot new novel by Dostoyevsky that everyone's talking about!
I bought this around the time that overlong essay about AI got posted. It's a very long book in three parts, and takes a while to get going. It opens with a quote from Luke 8, where unclean spirits are cast from one host to another, and in some sense the novel is about this, although the story is almost entirely non-supernatural.
During Part 1, if you didn't know better, you might think the book was going to be some sort of harmless social satire like a slightly grim-dark Jane Austen or something. We start out focused on the character of Stepan (true neutral, arguably), a boomer liberal type with the annoying habit of speaking in French, which is made more annoying by my edition's printing the translations thereof in endnotes rather than footnotes. We are told of his not-quite-romance with his rich patroness Varvara (lawful neutral), and her attempts to marry him off to someone else.
Still, these trivialities are overshadowed by the appearance of Varvara's questionably-sane son Nikolay (neutral evil) on the scene. A nihilist with no sense of morality, who cares nothing for social conventions, who frightens everyone around him, he is of course very popular with women. Anyway, he looms large over the rest of the book, and commentators (and Dostoyevsky himself) consider him perhaps the central figure - yet he doesn't actually do a whole lot to progress the plot forward (though he undeniably has a large effect on the actions and even personalities of others). In a book about nihilism, this particular personification is aimless and empty.
More directly active is Stepan's son Pyotr (chaotic evil). While Nikolay believes in nothing, Pyotr believes in himself, a cause he advances by doing Communism before it was cool. Pyotr advances the plot by advancing a plot -- a rather silly one, to be fair -- to destabilise the local authorities, though it's not like he has any reasonable plan to seize power afterwards. What is he really getting out of this? What drives him is not -- cannot be -- some material goal but some dark psychological need. He manages to ingratiate himself with the mayor's wife Yulia (lawful neutral, INT 8) another boomer liberal type with no enemies to the left.
Pyotr has a bunch of unsavory characters helping him, like Shigalyov (lawful evil) who predicts that, in the future, the intellectuals and elites will treat the masses like cattle to be controlled, though he's also wrong about some things. The book features many sympathetic characters too, such as Mavriky (lawful good) who is an almost comically upstanding man (or beta-male orbiter as today's kids might say) who loves Liza (chaotic good) who loves Nikolay. Then there's Bishop Tikhon (lawful good) who is perhaps the best character and Dostoyevsky's ideal of Christianity, present only in a censored chapter that doesn't even appear in the main text.
There is also Shatov (neutral good) who wants to believe in God (lawful good), and Kirillov (chaotic neutral?) who wants to become God, though he needs a better plan. Neither of these men came to their views on their own, but were profoundly influenced by Nikolay. Yet if Kirillov caught a demon from Nikolay and became one of the possessed ones, maybe Shatov was touched by an angel. God works in mysterious ways.
About half of the main characters die - this isn't a spoiler if I don't tell you which ones, ha, get rekt. As a prescient novel about Communist revolutionaries, it's really something, and the psychology of these characters is fascinating, if not always entirely plausible. It's quite challenging to read; if you're not careful you might skip over important points, especially since the narrator Anton (???) is not entirely reliable and must surely be making some stuff up.
Anyway, 9.5 out of 10, I'm glad I read it.