The Devil's Best Trick Hardcover - 2024

From the publisher

Part true crime story, part religious and literary history, an investigation into the nature of evil and the figure of the Devil by acclaimed journalist Randall Sullivan

Throughout history, humans have struggled to explain the
evils of the world and the darkest parts of ourselves. The Devil's Best
Trick is a unique and far-reaching investigation into evil and the
myriad ways we attempt to understand it - particularly through the figure of
the Devil.

Sullivan's narrative moves through centuries of historical,
religious, and cultural conceptions of evil and the Devil: from the
Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods to 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 references major literary, religious and historical
figures, from the Persian sages Zoroaster and Mani, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, John
Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleister Crowley, and many more, among them Charles
Baudelaire, from whose work Sullivan took the title of the book.

But this is not just a cultural history - Sullivan
intersperses original reporting and personal reflection. He 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 occurred in 1928 and lasted
four months. He ponders the psychology of evil through his encounter with one
brutal serial killer and he reports on the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s,
detailing the shocking story of a small town in Texas that, one summer in 1988,
unraveled into paranoia after a seventeen-year-old boy was found hanging from
the branch of a horse apple tree and rumors about cult worship spread
throughout the wider community.

Randall Sullivan, whose reportage and narrative skill has
been called "extraordinary" and "enthralling" by Rolling Stone,
takes on a bold task in this book that is both biography of the Devil and a
look at how evil manifests in the world.

About the author