The Devil's best trick : a history of evil

Sullivan, Randall2024

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Summary

The Devil's Best Trick is an 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 to the history of the devil-worshipping "Black Mass" ceremony and its depictions in 19th-century French literature. 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, unravelled into paranoia after a seventeen-year-old boy was found hanging from the branch of a horse apple tree and rumours about cult worship spread throughout the wider community.