When I was 12 years old, my family went on vacation and, at my request, left me behind. My mother told me that I could sleep in her and my stepdad’s bedroom — normally strictly off limits to kids — and watch their TV. The first night they were away, I made a horrifying mistake: “The Exorcist” was debuting on Canadian television. It came on around sunset. I turned on the TV and climbed into my parents’ bed. You know what happened next.
I wanted to go turn off the TV, but I didn’t dare for fear of what might be waiting in the darkness. I tried hiding under the covers but that only made it worse. I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I do know that every time I closed my eyes I could see the ravaged, green, grinning face of Linda Blair. As Randall Sullivan would say, the face of evil.
The Devil’s greatest trick, as the saying goes (attributed sometimes to Baudelaire and other times to “The Usual Suspects”), was to convince the world he doesn’t exist. Sullivan, an investigative journalist, goes out looking for him in our modern world. And “The Devil’s Best Trick” is a master class in the difficult art of first-person, narrative nonfiction.
At the start of his journey, Sullivan’s not sure if he believes in the Devil; by the end he is certain that Satan is real. Sullivan is never showy, and doesn’t insert himself into the story more than necessary, but we always feel he is there with us — which is often comforting and necessary, given his sinister subject.
The prose has wonderful momentum even when he’s writing about arcane debates in the early Christian church. 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.
He tells us that he cut quite a bit of the murder and torture material, but parents should still skip Chapters 9 and 10. When he says, of the serial murderer Westley Allan Dodd, “I’m not going to describe the things Dodd did next; they’re too horrible,” we are grateful; what he has included is very difficult to read.
One of the things that help make Sullivan a believer in the Devil is, ironically, Dodd’s ultimate relationship with the divine. That such a profoundly tormented — and, well, purely malevolent — personality could come to seem like a forgivable human being makes Sullivan wonder if there had indeed been a battle for Dodd’s soul between God and Satan. Certainly this is what his chaplain believed, saying, of the night of Dodd’s execution: “I can tell you that if Westley Allan Dodd had stood at the microphone that night, he would have said something about grace and mercy and forgiveness that would have brought 70,000 people to their feet. Because he knew whereof he spoke.” This causes Sullivan to wonder if there might be a place where the Devil is not conceptual, “but an actual being from whom one might either flee or seek favors.”
Where Sullivan really hits his stride is in his encounters with the purportedly possessed. We meet a Franciscan priest who, as a trained psychologist, considered exorcism an outmoded superstition — until participating in one. Sullivan describes an exorcism of a young woman he himself witnesses in Medjugorje, a pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In the last third of the book, Sullivan travels to Mexico. We learn about the human sacrifice and cannibalism of the Aztecs; the complexities and revisionist history of the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortes; the 21st-century collaboration between drug lords, kidnapping rings and the cultlike religious following, numbering in the millions, of Santa Muerte (or Saint Death). We watch as two goats are sacrificed to El Diablo.
The final chapter details one of the most famous exorcisms in American history, and unless you simply refuse to believe multiple eyewitnesses — if you are the sort of skeptic who feels that mass delusion is more plausible than the possibility of powers normally unseen — you will leave strongly inclined to agree with the author that evil is literally real.
I have had experiences in my life that most people might describe as “supernatural.” And though, unlike Sullivan, I do not believe in Satan, I think there are indeed all kinds of phenomena unexplained by contemporary science — which is, after all, still in its infancy. What is more, I tend to believe that people like Randall Sullivan are intellectually responsible and acting in good faith; we should at least open our minds to the possibility that they may know something we do not.
This book will doubtless be made into a television show, and this is the rare case where that’s good. I wouldn’t watch it; just reviewing the book has me petrified. Reading it, I was once again 12 and alone in the house.
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