Book review: The Devils Best Trick by Randall Sullivan

July 26, 2024

On the morning of Nov. 20, 1961, Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, swam up to a group of Asmat warriors along the southwest coast of New Guinea. In short order, the scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families on Earth, a young man universally described by friends and relatives as good, was, as I found while reporting my book “Savage Harvest,” speared, killed, cooked over a fire and eaten.

It’s hard to find a more glaring definition of sin, wickedness and evil — the Devil’s work, if you’re thinking in those terms — than such violence done to a sacred human body. But what if Pep, Fin and Ajam, the men who did the deed, had never heard of God or the Devil, Adam and Eve and the serpent? What if they were acting under their own ancient, sacred laws and a radically different concept of evil? What if the Asmats didn’t consider what they did to Rockefeller a sin at all, but a widely accepted practice that restored the world’s balance and harmony, and permitted an entire community to live in peace after years of suffering?

In “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared,” by Randall Sullivan, such a question is never asked, much less answered. This literary, historical and on-the-ground “investigation into the inescapable reality of evil and the myriad ways humankind attempts to understand and confront it through the figure of the Devil,” as the publicity sheet proclaims, is one big, sloppy mess that is written strictly from the perspective of the minority of humankind who call themselves Christians, a group that’s been around for the briefest sliver of time. Which matters, in this case, because a book whose purpose is to explore what evil is and why it exists across humankind falls short the second it fixates on this single archetype as expressed in a single myth, to the exclusion of others, while also mostly claiming that myth isn’t mythical at all. “I had long since decided that there is a Devil, a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it,” Sullivan writes. “I had come to believe … that all the discord, calumny, and sheer hatred that drive the world were descended from the first break with God that the Devil had made before there was any time to count, let alone human beings to corrupt or redeem. It was all a product of this original separation.”

But the Asmat, along with most of the people on Earth since before there was any time to count, never broke from God, never experienced original separation, either literally or metaphorically. Nor did the Aztecs, who, unbelievably, are the only non-Christian, pre-contact people to enter Sullivan’s narrative with any substance. Even more unbelievably, they do so as forces of evil through the eyes of none other than the Spanish conquistadors Hernán Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, whose journals are the definitive account of the event.

In 1519, Cortes and 500-odd men landed on the shores of the Yucatán and marched on Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire (today’s Mexico City), destroying its temples, killing its priests and imprisoning its ruler, Montezuma (a story illuminatingly told in Álvaro Enrigue’s splendid novel “You Dreamed of Empires”). Sullivan writes that ripping the hearts out of living human beings, eating their body parts, building temples from piles of human skulls and other unquestionably freaky, horrific practices, which amounted to the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, were clearly evil, the Devil’s work.

It’s hard to imagine anyone happily consenting to having their beating heart ripped out on a stone pyre, sure, but thanks to Cortes and the men who came in his footsteps, upward of 50 million people were murdered by guns, germs and steel. In the process, whole complex civilizations like the Aztec and Inca, peoples with their own intricate codes and ethics and morals and arts, were wiped out. If evil is “anything that causes harm or suffering to a sentient being,” as Sullivan writes (citing the religious-studies scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell), the Christians who poured into the New World were archfiends at the Devil’s work compared with people such as the Asmats and the Aztecs, a point of comparison that Sullivan never grapples with.

I’m not nitpicking here. Sullivan is the author of six previous books and a veteran narrative journalist who has long written about crime and war for Rolling Stone and other publications, and he should know better. I wanted so much to love “The Devil’s Best Trick,” but it’s a real head-shaker from start to finish. In the opening pages, Sullivan travels to a remote part of Veracruz, Mexico, the supposed epicenter of black-magic worshipers and witches, or brujos, who weave spells and bring harm, an old and rich element of Mexican culture and of a piece with similar syncretic traditions throughout Latin America. (Think Maximon, the patron saint of prostitutes and bandits in Guatemala, who likes a cigarette or 10 along with his shots of aguardiente and is venerated in the same rooms as Jesus himself.) It’s a promising start, telegraphing that we’re going in deep, on the ground, with a skilled reporter. I was excited!

But just six pages in, he breaks away from Mexico and begins a slog through the Devil’s appearance in Christian theology and literary history that goes on for more than 100 pages, interwoven not with scenes in Mexico, out of which Sullivan yanked us, but with the death of Tate Rowland, a young man found hanging from a tree in Childress, Tex., in 1988. Did Rowland commit suicide, as the police decided at the time, or was he murdered in some kind of satanic cult? How about his sister, who turned up dead three years later? Sullivan digs into the story and rumors of satanic cults sweeping America at the time, over many chapters, in breaks between 1,000 years of theological arguments about the nature of evil in the face of a perfect God (the essential question), and comes up empty-handed. We still don’t know if Rowland was murdered or not, or if any cult was involved, and there’s nothing particularly enlightening or compelling about the events of Childress, period.

Finally, Sullivan takes us back to Mexico, via side roads into Stanley Milgram’s infamous prison experiment and an exorcism that took place in Earling, Iowa, in 1928. At last! But instead of going deep — there’s a whole country and culture of witches and healers, or curanderos, and a cult of Santa Muerte that he could have spent months really getting to know — Sullivan’s total research amounts to one trip of a few days to one place, where he meets with the 78-year-old nephew of a great brujo’s girlfriend, the brujo himself having died in the 1960s, and the equally aged daughter of the brujo’s apprentice, also long gone, both of whom tell Sullivan second- and third-hand stories for a night or two. Sullivan, who can’t speak Spanish, and his interpreter spend more time worrying about being shanghaied by narcos (this, too, is perhaps supposed to be redolent of the Devil’s presence) than they do actually making sense of the historical and cultural role played by healers and witches in Mexico — never mind what all of that tells us about good and evil or the idea of the Devil.

There are hints along this crooked journey that Sullivan was as confused while writing his book as I was reading it. He once mentions deleting most of the text, almost 200 pages, and having to start again. His trips to Mexico and much of his reporting took place in 2015, nine years ago, an indication that he has been struggling over this for, well, a devilishly long time. Who knows? The Devil, of course, works in all sorts of insidious and nefarious ways. Sometimes, we’re told, people sit down with him and make a deal, sell their souls, as the brujos did in Mexico, and as the fiddler did in the Charlie Daniels song, for extra power. If only Sullivan had made such a deal as he struggled with writing this book. But, alas, he never seems to have met him, no matter where he looked.

Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including “Savage Harvest,” for which he learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia and lived in a remote Asmat village in West Papua, Indonesia.

The Devil’s Best Trick

How the Face of Evil Disappeared

By Randall Sullivan

Atlantic Monthly. 333 pp. $30

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