The Devil has not only been a popular figure in classic literature—Dante Alighieri's Inferno (1321), Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1604), John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (1880), Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger (1916), etc.—but has also been a mainstay in American pop culture as well. There are countless songs and movies and television shows that feature or reference Satan: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band, “Friend of the Devil” by The Grateful Dead, “The Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden, “N.I.B.” by Black Sabbath, and “Running With The Devil” by Van Halen, to name just a few songs and who can forget movies like Angel Heart, The Witches of Eastwick, Rosemary’s Baby, or South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut?
Although the Devil goes by many names—Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, the Antichrist, Sammael, Old Scratch, etc.—and even more incarnations, it’s obvious why the Lord of Hell makes a forceful character in works of literature. The Devil is the ultimate moral antagonist, the perfect villain… I mean, c’mon, what could be worse than meeting the embodiment of pure evil?
That’s why I had to read the latest anthology from Night Shade Books, Sympathy for the Devil, a simply stellar collection of 35 devilish short stories. And although a few classic stories are thrown in for good measure—“Young Goodman Brown” (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Imp” (1891), “Sold to Satan” (1904) by Mark Twain, etc.—the bulk of the anthology are stories written by a virtual who’s who of contemporary genre fiction luminaries: Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, China Mieville, Jeffrey Ford, Holly Black, Scott Westerfeld, Kage Baker, and Elizabeth Bear, to name a few.
None of these stories are new (in fact, I’ve read a lot of them before) but reading them in this compilation and in this order—King’s “The Main in the Black Suit” follows Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” for example—makes for a wonderfully thought provoking reading experience.
It’s fascinating to discover how so many different authors can use the character of Lucifer in so many different—and entertaining—manifestations. The Devil in de Lint’s “Ten for the Devil” is a savvy trickster, in Gaiman’s “The Price,” Satan is a shapeshifting nightmare visiting homes at night, and in Jay Lake’s disturbing “The Goat Cutter,” the devil is a mythological wonder. “He had muscles like a movie star, and a gold tan all the way down, like he’d never wore clothes. The hair on his chest and his short-and-curlies was blonde, and he was hung good. What near to made me puke was that angel’s body had a goat head. Only it weren’t no goat head you ever saw in your life. It was like a big heavy ram’s head, except it had antlers coming up off the top, a twelve point spread off a prize buck, and baby’s eyes—big, blue, and round in the middle…”
Not all of the stories featured in Sympathy for the Devil are memorable, but most of them are: like Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” (1948) an unarguable classic about an unassuming professor and a demonic childhood toy that has irrevocably twisted his life, and Mieville’s “Details,” which explores pareidolia in a story about a young boy and an elderly woman who can glean wisdom from viewing the patterns of the world around her. Looking into those patterns too deeply, however, can be dangerous: “It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible…”
Yes, the Devil is a supremely multifaceted character; he (or she!) can be terrifying, cunning, seductive, funny, ruthless, but the stories featured within this anthology are so much more than simply stories about the Devil; they’re a glimpse inside our own souls, a look at the wickedness inside us all, that ongoing battle between good and evil.
Entertaining and enlightening, this collection of satanic stories is, well, heavenly. And if anyone asks you why you're reading this anthology, just tell them the Devil made you do it!
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for almost the last two decades and has written more than 6,000 reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, and BarnesandNoble.com. In his free time, he reads.
