The Devil's Best Trick

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.