Two-Step Devil

Two-Step Devil 

By Jamie Quatro 

Grove Press; 2024 

Hardcover: $27.00 

Genre: Fiction 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” That verse from Hebrews 11 became a refrain in my mind while reading Jamie Quatro’s metafiction novel, Two-Step Devil. A stream-of-consciousness passage of a troubled young girl’s travel brought Faulkner to mind. And a Christian theological discussion in play-form in what is essentially the “third act” of the novel made me think of Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell.” Although other literary references might pop up in the course of reading Two-Step Devil, the overall impression is one of stark and startling originality and power in this story of “the Prophet,” a seventy-year-old visionary artist living off the grid on Lookout Mountain in Alabama in 2014, and Michael, the fourteen-year-old girl he “rescues” from a sex trafficking ring. 

Jamie Quatro, the author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon, teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Two-Step Devil’s mesmeric effect comes from the questions it raises – about faith, fate, people on the fringes, and human connections – and from the pristine beauty of the language with which it is told. There are passages so beautifully written that a reader lingers for a moment in the strange and enticing poetry of the words and the place. In the absence of a working clock, Michael tells time by the sounds around her —of bird song and frog clack and coyotes “celebrating something,” of “hymns from the faraway steeple, the one at noon about the mighty fortress and the one at six about once being lost but now being found.” 

The Prophet tells Michael the hymns are about her as he quietly prepares her to take a dire message to Washington, D.C., to warn the President. Apocalyptic visions are the guiding force behind his prophetic paintings based on images revealed on a movie screen – “clean-sheet white, five feet square” – that unfolds before his eyes and abruptly disappears. To his eyes, nuclear cooling towers are warring beehives. He rails against the “Unholy American Trinity” of Government plus Big Business plus Church, “joined together as one to keep the working class down.” The problem with America is “All size and no modesty.” The Prophet worries that the Biblical Jesus sometimes “seems like a pushover,” but he is drawn to the red words of Jesus Himself in his Bible: “Red-words Jesus had a whip and a temper. He told people off and didn’t give a damn.” Looking at x-rays of his cancerous tumor, the Prophet thinks that “Something this beautiful can only be of the Lord.”  

Time, the Prophet knows, is “just a sheet of wax paper laid over everything you could see.” What he doesn’t know is that Michael – the “Big Fish,” the naif to carry the Prophet’s prophecies to the President – is running out of time to fulfill a personal mission. She realizes that the Prophet’s mission will enable her to get the help she needs. Part of Two-Step Devil is told from Michael’s point of view as she sets out for Washington, making stops at places in Chattanooga from the previous phase of her life. 

In the early parts of the book, the eponymous devil lurks and taunts the Prophet from the corners of the makeshift mountain house built around a tree trunk. The devil takes a larger role after that dramatized segment and begins to directly address the readers – the “flesh sacks” – and the reliability of the authorial voice becomes nebulous. As the narrative becomes more porous, authority is gradually ceded to the reader’s own conclusions. 

In Two-Step Devil, Jamie Quatro’s narrative approach feels fresh and unique and urgent. This surprising and quietly intense book invites pondering and is somehow hopeful in its bleak worldview and the beauty of its language. At one point, a woman brings her ailing brother, a blind man, to hear the Prophet’s healing song. She accuses the Prophet of giving her brother “false hope.” Perhaps so. But sometimes, we must cling to whatever hope we can find.  

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).