Two-Step Devil
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE WILLIE MORRIS AWARD FOR SOUTHERN WRITING - FICTION
“Jamie Quatro is a writer of sinuous, muscular power and grace. Two-Step Devil is a starkly gorgeous story of God and loss and art and love, and her best book yet.” —Lauren Groff
From a New York Times Notable “writer of great originality” comes a bold new novel about love, faith and two societal outsiders whose lives converge in the contemporary American South
The “fearless” (New Yorker) author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon—whose recently published stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review have brought her new attention—is known for her sharp, seductive prose and masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures.
In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.
Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Quatro (Fire Sermon) reckons with faith and the nature of evil in her daring and disturbing latest. The narrative centers on a 70-year-old man, known as the Prophet, who lives alone in a ramshackle cabin in the hollows of Alabama's Lookout Mountain, where he carries on dialogues with a shadowy Lucifer-like figure whom he calls Two-Step. When the Prophet spies a girl bound by zip ties in the custody of two sex traffickers, he rescues the 14-year-old, who's named Michael, and becomes convinced she's a messenger sent by God. The Prophet carefully tends to Michael as she suffers through opioid withdrawal and later rebuffs her attempts to repay his kindness with sexual favors. Once Michael is well enough, the Prophet sends her to Washington, D.C., with instructions to deliver his divinely inspired message to the White House. But Michael has been harboring a secret from the Prophet, and she embarks on her own course of action. Quatro's descriptions of child abuse can feel gratuitous, but she poses provocative questions about consent by drawing parallels between Michael's sex work and Mary's immaculate conception ("As if obtaining the consent of a fourteen-year-old exonerated Creator of the crime!" Two-Step says). It's hard to turn away from Quatro's electrifying vision.
