Superstitions

“The Devil’s Best Trick,” Randall Sullivan’s in-depth occult investigation, is not for the easily frightened.THE DEVIL’S BEST TRICK: How the Face of Evil Disappeared, by Randall SullivanWhen 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More