The Devil’s Best Trick by Randall Sullivan
When I saw this in the bookshop I knew I had to buy it. I am currently researching the history of the devil in western culture (see another relevant book review here: The Devil’s Atlas — An Explorer’s Guide to Heavens, Hells and Afterworlds by Edward Brooke-Hitching), so this book looked perfect.
The book in is two parts of about equal size. The first part (“The Author of Evil”) interleaves a history of the development of the idea of Satan in Christianity with an account of a Satanic ritual murder in a red-neck town in the USA. This interleaving of historical account and a salacious true-crime story works really well to keep the book engaging, as you might expect from a writer and editor for Rolling Stone. But this also highlights why I decided to stop reading at the end of part one, and not read the second part (I read to page 168 of 333 pages). The author is a convert to Catholicism and a believer in the literal existence of Satan. Hence for him these two things — a historical account of Satan in Christianity, and a murder carried out by “Satanist” youths that got their crude philosophy watching horror movies — are linked because in his mind they are both evidence for the literal existence of Satan.
Let’s not beat around the bush. If you believe, like the author, in the literal existence of Satan, the Catholic miracles, and a benevolent god, you are unhinged from reality. And as the book progresses, it moves into serious fruitcake territory.
The history of Satan starts really well, beginning with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, the early Christian movements that linked the snake with Satan, and the literary interpretations of Dante, Milton and Blake, but then rather than continuing with the development of Satan as a literary figure, it moves on to secret societies, the Freemasons, and “The Illuminati”. Whilst I do find secret societies really interesting, I don’t think they are relevant to the development of Satan as an idea, and I don’t want to read about them by an author that believes they are manifestations of a literal Satan. A review in The Washington Post calls the book “one big, sloppy mess that is written strictly from the perspective of the minority of humankind who call themselves Christians”.
This book is fun and easy to read, and has a lot of hooks to keep you reading. I may read part two at some point (“The Door He Hides Behind”). But for me it is just a piece of entertainment written by someone who is borderline crazy, not a serious non-fiction work.