The Devil’s Atlas — An Explorer’s Guide to Heavens, Hells and Afterworlds by Edward Brooke-Hitching
This is a lovely book physically — I love this style of printing of great reproductions of wonderful artworks on thick matt textured paper. And there really are a lot of great artworks in this book. It’s a fascinating subject, and my main criticism is that it takes it too broadly. It tries to cover the idea of “The Devil” across many different cultures, even when it’s not really a good match (for example when a culture has various gods that fit). Just considering it from a Christian perspective, the story is vast, and I think it would have made a much more satisfactory book, a least from the point of view of the textual content, if it had just focused on Satan from Genesis onwards in Christianity. That has spawned so much great art and literature that there is really no need to spread the net wider, and in doing so the author has made the narrative of this book a little superficial and shallow. A great book to look at and browse, but not so great if you are really interested in understanding the history of The Devil.