His lexicon is occult as well as criminal. This is a world of negatives, dark rooms and transparencies. He inverts the old anthropological canard about groups [ ...] believing that the camera steals the soul. Sinclair presents Deakin's imagined life as a form of botched exorcism, with the subjects warped, distorted and smeared like sitters in a Bacon painting. - Stuart Kelly, The Spectator
'[ Pariah Genius] gives us a rollicking account of the celebrity criminals, obliging osteopaths and screaming queens of the seedy quarter. This brotherhood of the damned was caught by Deakins unforgiving camera, his prints bringing out their terror and melancholy. [ ...] Sinclair gives brilliant, pungent accounts of the sacred sites: Wheelers oyster bar, the Colony Club, the Watermans Arms and the French House. [ ...] Sinclair is particularly imaginative with his cinematic and literary parallels and digressions. - Roger Lewis, The Times
The result is a remarkable fictional biography - or psychobiographic fiction - written in Sinclair's highly poetic and dazzlingly allusive prose. - Tancred Newbury, Literary Review
