Devil Take It

Set in Trump’s Washington, Devil Take It is an ironic moral fable and an uproarious newspaper and political satire anchored in the current moment, yet timeless in its diction and humanity. Satan visits Washington as Dr. Grippin Fall, a psychiatrist. He diagnoses Eustace Bogges, editor of the letters page of the Washington Oracle, with a condition he calls mortality. Over the course of his therapy, Bogges learns the infernal view of humankind’s history from Adam and Eve to the present, as the Devil tempts him with an irreverent gospel of laughter and mirth, whose messiah is the 16th-century French writer François Rabelais. Meanwhile, Bogges mischievously contributes a pseudonymous letter to his own page suggesting that we’d be a hell of a lot better off if everybody would simply mind their own business. To Bogges’s astonishment and dismay, the slogan seizes the imagination of all of Washington’s inhabitants. Trump, too, embraces the notion but for his own political and financial gain, unleashing a final spasm of civil anarchy that brings history to a halt. Written in the grand satirical tradition of Mark Twain, Mikhail Bulgakov, and John Kennedy Toole, this is a devilishly funny tale filled with absurd twists and surprising revelations.