The Demons' Apartment

About this book

Between the walls of ancient houses in Egyptian villages and the clamor of Alexandria and its squares, Khaled Al-Khatib weaves in his book 'The Demons' Apartment' the threads of a memory that never grows old. The work begins from that decisive moment in the summer of 1986, when the door of 'Cleopatra's Apartment' opened to turn the author's life upside down, transforming it from a mere residential experience into an existential journey oscillating between doubt and certainty, and between the world of humans and the hidden secrets of jinn and ghosts. The book is not merely a narration of horror stories or haunted tales but a real 'time machine' in which the author deposited excerpts of his life as a witness to the times. Al-Khatib takes us from the rituals of ancestors and his grandmother 'the semi-angelic creature' who conversed with the spirits of dawn, to memories of youth and adolescence in the city of Desouk on the banks of the Nile, and on to the years of army service and foreign missions and the estrangement of the soul. The book's tone escalates to touch the human soul in its weakest and strongest moments, where major political events intertwine.