Part true crime story, part historical account, part
religious and literary analysis, an investigation into how humankind has
identified and confronted evil through the figure of the Devil from acclaimed
journalist Randall Sullivan How
we explain the evils of the world - and the darkest parts of ourselves - has
preoccupied humans throughout history. Plato may have been the first to suggest
the existence of the Devil in his argument that evil was merely the lack of
good: "A moral emptiness that arose from the imperfection of the created
world," as Sullivan describes it.
A
sweeping and comprehensive search for the origins of belief in a Satanic figure
across the centuries, The Devil's Best Trick is a keen
investigation into the inescapable reality of evil and the myriad ways we
attempt to understand it. Instructive, riveting, and unnerving, this is
a profound rumination on crime, violence, and the darkness in all of us.
In The
Devil's Best Trick, Randall Sullivan travels to Catemaco, Mexico, to
participate in the "Hour of the Witches" -- an annual ceremony in which
hundreds of people congregate in the jungle south of Vera Cruz to negotiate
terms with El Diablo. He takes us through the most famous and best-documented
exorcism in American history, which lasted four months. And, woven throughout,
he delivers original reporting on the shocking story of a small town in Texas
that, one summer in 1988, unraveled into paranoia and panic after a
seventeen-year-old boy was found hanging from the branch of a horse apple tree
and rumors about Satanic worship and cults spread throughout the wider
community.
Sullivan
also brilliantly melds historical, religious, and cultural conceptions of evil:
from the Book of Job to the New Testament to the witch hunts in Europe in the
15th through 17th centuries to the history of
the devil-worshipping "Black Mass" ceremony and its depictions in 19th
century French literature. He brings us through to the "Satanic Panic" of the
1980s and the story of one brutal serial killer, pondering the psychology of
evil. He weaves in writings by John Milton, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Edgar
Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and many more,
among them Charles Baudelaire, from whose work Sullivan took the title of the
book.
Nimble and expertly researched, The Devil's Best Trick is a meld of
the historical breadth of preeminent historians Elaine Pagels and Karen
Armstrong and the true-crime propulsion of Patrick Radden Keefe and Michelle
McNamara. Randall Sullivan, whose reportage and narrative skill has been called
"extraordinary" and "enthralling" by Rolling Stone, takes on a
bold task in this book -- essentially crafting, from over a decade of research,
a biography of the Devil.
