HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Beware—ghosts, vampires, and all creatures of the night have awakened and are ready to creep beyond the pages. To help you get into the spooky spirit, we are recommending some of our most bone-chilling and remarkable reads. Witches, hauntings, devils – oh my! We have a book for everyone this Halloween – enter these eerie stories if you dare.

BOOKS ABOUT DEVILS

Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro

In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life.

“Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, Two-Step Devil is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry, infused with the genre’s requisite imagery of ‘thick blankets of kudzu’ vines and smells of ‘blood, grease and sweat.’ And, like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.”—Melissa Broder, New York Times

The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared by 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.

“Each chapter is a turn, a surprise. The writing is never clichéd, nor is the thinking. Sullivan knows a great lede, and he’s just as good with cliffhangers.”–Clancy Martin, New York Times Book Review

The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan, who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past, and dour, frigid Death, who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by fourteen saints. With Jacob recalling his life in Cairo, Beirut, Sana’a, Stockholm, and San Francisco, Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrayal of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound and winning story of the war between memory and oblivion with which we wrestle every day of our life.

“Alameddine, entrancing and unflinching, is in easy command of his bricolage narrative, and he leavens its tragedy with wit.” —New York Times Book Review