The Devil's Best Trick

How the Face of Evil Disappeared

By: Randall Sullivan

Narrated by: Lane Hakel

Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

How we explain the evils of the world, and the darkest parts of ourselves, has preoccupied humans throughout history. 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 brilliantly melds cultural and historical commentary and a suspenseful true-crime narrative. 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.

©2024 Randall Sullivan (P)2024 Dreamscape Media

Fascinating

First off, the narration is great. He makes it clear by using inflection whether you’re hearing something italicized or in quotation marks, and you can tell who is saying what without the narrator resorting to over-the-top accents and silly female affectations and such. Very good performance. As for the book itself, definitely the audio equivalent of a page-turner. I bought it on a whim after barely skimming a NYT book review about it and I’m glad I took a chance. I would attempt to summarize it here but I would fall dreadfully short of coherent. Suffice to say, it is extremely well written and I blasted through it faster than any other audiobook of this length. A truly fascinating deep-dive into the human understanding of evil.

Performance was good

Interesting but lacking. The author meandered and the point of the book was unfortunately lost.

Interesting true crime, ok history, bad narration

The true crime elements — Childress and Mexico — are great. The history is ok and interesting. The narration is bad — the narrator can’t get names of Christian saints or heretical movements right.

Patience Required or Bust

Firstly, a big shout out to the superb narrator of this book: nice job w/ a story that sometimes gets lost in the historical weeds (especially in Part 1). Also, you nailed those difficult names: I am so impressed.

The story requires patience, because it seesaws between a narrative of the author’s search for the truth about the devil—does he really exist?—and a huge plunge into research re: el diablo in literature, religion, philosophy, etc. The very beginning of this tale grabs you (a smartly dressed Lucifer even tips his hat to the author), and then for whatever reason, we get lost in a possible satanic ritual murder in Texas and too much of the author’s random research about The Devil. There was a lack of integration here.

I almost gave up on the book when I finished Part 1. I slept on it. Then decided to peek into Part 2: if it was more of the same long yawn through his research notes, I’d bail. But the gripping narrative returned, and the historical context of El Diablo in Mexico nicely dovetailed with the story line. A slice of the beginning of Part 1, and all of Part 2, is the real book.