Jamie Quatro cultivated a reputation as a provocateur with her two previous books, the story collection I Want to Show You More (2013) and her debut novel, Fire Sermon (2018). She complicates Southern Christian narratives through characters who hold faith in one fist and lust in the other, carrying out sins like adultery while maintaining deep relationships with the divine.
Quatro continues this inquiry with her second novel, Two-Step Devil, a narrative in three acts. The first introduces a 70-year-old man who calls himself the Prophet. Living alone in Alabama in 2014, the Prophet detests organized religion, but the inside of his cabin is covered with paintings of his visions from God. He is also taunted by a figure he calls the Two-Step Devil. One day, at a gas station, the Prophet sees a teenage girl, drugged and zip-tied, being shoved into the backseat of a car.
After a bumbling rescue, the Prophet helps the girl, Michael, regain her health. Their time together is beautiful, a quiet kinship, but it can’t last. Michael must eventually move on to the next stage of her life, and she narrates the vulnerable second section as if she’s giving a hurried walking tour of Chattanooga, Tennessee, intercut with memories of her childhood sexual assaults and coercion into trafficking.
In the novel’s third section, Two-Step steps into the spotlight—quite literally, as the story is now structured as a play, with the Prophet wasting away upstage. The devil ecstatically monologues at the reader (“Greetings, fleshsacks!”) on the misconceptions in Christian narratives, and goes wildly off-script from scripture.
Two-Step Devil is a bold interrogation—even a condemnation—of rigid adherence to Christian rules, and it’s apparent that it is intended first and foremost to provoke. While it is rousing to see a Christian writer lay claim to their God in this way—challenging their religion to do better, and insisting upon critical thought amid ambivalence rather than blind faith—the story can be tedious and pretentious, as during the devil’s lectures, or gratuitously violent and unsettled, as in Michael’s section. Still, Quatro’s characters are beguiling, and Two-Step Devil is often tender, especially during the Prophet’s section. Quatro’s prose ranks among the best Southern writing: “When God looked down at the planet, he was seeing what people saw when they looked up: darkness, with a few brave lights trembling here and there. The darkness was evil and the lights were God’s children staking a claim.”
Quatro excels at getting the hairs on your arms to stand on end, if not through narrative suspense, then through the radical nature of her narrative aim: taking on the South’s political obsession with following religious guidelines, its dogged insistence on dogmatic good versus evil, which is completely impotent when a person is caught in the throes of actual evil. Without question, Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South, our patron saint of Southern discomfort.
