Two-Step Devil
Jamie Quatro
(Author)
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Description
WINNER OF THE WILLIE MORRIS AWARD FOR SOUTHERN WRITING - FICTION
"Jamie Quatro is a writer of sinuous, muscular power and grace. Two-Step Devil is a starkly gorgeous story of God and loss and art and love, and her best book yet." -Lauren Groff
From a New York Times Notable "writer of great originality" comes a bold new novel about love, faith and two societal outsiders whose lives converge in the contemporary American South
The "fearless" (New Yorker) author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon--whose recently published stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review have brought her new attention--is known for her sharp, seductive prose and masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures.
In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet--a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions--lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet's remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past--and perhaps change her future.
Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.
Product Details
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Publish Date | September 10, 2024 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780802163134 |
| Dimensions | 8.1 X 5.5 X 1.2 inches | 0.8 pounds |
About the Author
Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Maison Dora Maar, and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Reviews
Praise for Two-Step Devil
Winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing - Fiction
An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Best Book of the Year from The Paris Review and the Atlanta Journal Constitution
A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 from Literary Hub
"Just as the Prophet makes art out of detritus, Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter-sexual abuse, terminal disease, mental illness, poverty, suicide and American decay--into transcendent beauty . . . Quatro writes with the musicality and command of a mystic poet. Her sentences are also propulsive; the novel is a page-turner that leaves readers feeling deeply invested in the fates of the Prophet and Michael, individually and together . . . Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, Two-Step Devil is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry, infused with the genre's requisite imagery of 'thick blankets of kudzu' vines and smells of 'blood, grease and sweat.' And, like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world." -- Melissa Broder, New York Times
"Two-Step Devil is in part an unusual father-daughter story, as Ms. Quatro embroiders a fragile and very sweet relationship between the outcasts . . . Intimately evoked . . . Ms. Quatro is a rare novelist for whom a religious belief in good and evil is not merely a plot device but a genuine guide to describing reality." -- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"In Jamie Quatro's fiction, a person is a burning thing: a voracious creature, hot with emotional, sexual and spiritual needs; prey to the squalid demands of embodied existence. Surely it's my imagination, but when I read Quatro--whether her story collection, I Want to Show You More (2013), her debut novel, Fire Sermon (2018), or her new book, the novel Two-Step Devil--I can't shake the sense that the pages feel warm to the touch. I see, in my mind's eye, her sentences threaded with muscle and sinew, letters glistening with sweat and blood . . . Across Quatro's oeuvre, there is no forgetting that selfhood is material: pulp and tissue and cuts . . . If Quatro has written a song for the frail fleshsack, she has, too, intimated humanity's cowardice in storytelling, the entwined 'horrific and beautiful' realities we balk at, and in desperate self-preservation, refuse to witness." -- Rachel Verona Cote, Washington Post
"Utterly brilliant and BOLD . . . [Quatro's] at her best in her latest Southern Gothic masterpiece." -- Bradley Sides, Electric Literature
"I've long thought Lookout Mountain would be an ideal setting for a sharp-edged, tangy novel, layered with the region's mysteries, and Jamie Quatro's Two-Step Devil delivers the goods . . . In her previous work Quatro has dramatized the skirmishing desires of body and soul, and she continues to plumb those themes here. There are faint echoes of Cormac McCarthy and Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain. But like the Prophet's singular visions, her literary meditations are hers and hers alone: Two-Step Devil quickens suspense right through to the last page, her sentences taut yet beautifully made, her political content subtle, her compassion resonant." -- Hamilton Cain, Chapter 16
"Two-Step Devil is not only a darkly humorous and insightful novel, but a dramatic tragedy. We are presented with brightness an
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