The Devil in Many Guises

From Christopher Marlowe to Goethe to Thomas Mann, writers have gravitated to the Faustian bargain as a narrative device. Now Rickey Fayne reimagines the Mephistophelean myth in his sumptuous novel The Devil Three Times, a multigenerational Black saga that limns the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow South, and even the legend of blues maestro Robert Johnson. Fayne follows his own intuitive logic, blending biblical allusions with polyphonic first-person chapters as he maps out the Laurent family’s struggles and triumphs across generations.

Fayne kicks off his prismatic tale with a riff on Paradise Lost, as Jesus and the Devil trade barbs, equal parts antagonism and affection. The Devil goes off on his own, roaming the Earth, “propping up empires and watching them fall, making waves wherever he found calm.” He encounters Yetunde, a young woman aboard a ship embarked from West Africa, and strikes a deal that resonates down through her descendants as the author explores themes of freedom, ritual, and ancestry in the New World. Known for her yellow dress and reputation as a healer, Yetunde straddles a line between a grim reality and a spiritual realm, “making loops in the air with a smoking bundle of herbs.” She seeks to ground her family amid deceit and brutality, but only half-succeeds.

Fayne, who grew up in rural West Tennessee, unspools his plot through a series of first-person sections, recalling Yaa Gyasi’s technique in Homegoing. We meet Yetunde’s children: Lucille, a conjure woman, and the light-skinned Asa, who benefits from white patrons and quotes Hobbes and Kant. This pair casts long shadows into the future. There’s Asa’s son, the aptly named Bubba, who learns in a letter that “the age of miracles is not past.” There’s Louis, whose feud with his brother nearly breaks him. There’s Benny Ross, a musical prodigy in the vein of Johnson, who finds salvation in his instrument: “A man from another church came to play the guitar alongside me singing. I’d heard guitars on the radio before but had never seen one up close. The man let me fiddle with it a little and showed me how to strum out a few notes and when I came back for practice, Reverand Walter had a six-string waiting for me.” And throughout the novel the Devil appears in many guises — seer, wise guy, shrewd businessman — picking off souls at his leisure. It’s a delicious irony that this archdemon is the most fully realized character, all too human in his machinations.

The Devil Three Times, a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, is a fussy novel with a sprawling cast and shifting throughline, but it speaks to the dark underbelly of religion in the South and the agonizing conflicts of race, class, and gender that define the region. Like Milton before him, Fayne understands redemption is a fool’s game, yet one that calls out to us, a siren’s song. And in his interpretation of literature and scripture he offers a truth that transcends a pastor’s sermon or a river baptism, bracing in its clarity.