Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
—Shakespeare, The Tempest
Many writers dedicate their books to their ideal readers: partners, parents, and mentors. But few play with the convention like Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, where the Prince of Darkness is muse, integral character, and primary reader. The book isn’t easy to classify. Part short story collection, part speculative writer’s memoir in flash chapters, it is a meta-horror, and a Dantesque exploration of politics, immigration, relationships, and the art of writing. It alternates between speculative stories, fictionalized personal essays, and chapters of the writer’s notes. It has the raw, and slightly dangerous, feel of a manuscript you’d find hidden beneath the floorboards of a deceased author’s study or forgotten on a bench in Union Square Park, a post-it on top saying “For Satan.”
Lima brings the uncanny of the everyday into relief by alternating between modernity and weird nostalgia. Recent events such as the Covid pandemic, as well as previous American and Brazilian presidencies, are constant sources of tension for the ubiquitous “writer” during her friendly meetings with the Devil. The writer’s anxious reflections on Trump and Bolsonaro support the short stories’ aesthetic: a Twilight Zone-like presentation of an outward normality that’s teeming with ills beneath.
The first story, “Rapture,” has a great opening: “You probably can’t tell by looking at me now, but once, back in my twenties, I slept with the Devil. We met at a Halloween party in a closed-down store space in Manhattan, Union Square, in 1981.” The narrator sets a tone that’s both lighthearted and melancholy, nonchalantly mentioning sex with the Devil as if Satan were just a minor celebrity, while indicating that her current age makes it now seem less believable. As if the idea of a grown woman’s sexual life, present and past, were more outlandish than the presence of the Dark Lord. The meeting itself is filled with a jokey dread:
I was inauguration Nancy Reagan: a tighter version of the red Adolfo dress, black gloves, a wig between chestnut brown and dirty blond, topped with a red pill hat. He wore an ill-fitting suit, a faded orange wig, and some bad foundation. I walked up to him and asked what he was, yelling over the music. He said he was the future.
Unsurprisingly, the Devil is charming and funny. The link to Trump makes for a nice parallel with a Faustian Devil, one that offers help while minimizing the gravity of his hunger for souls. How many times did we hear that the soul of the United States was on the ballot in 2020? However, the parallel is put to rest swiftly in the chapter that follows “Rapture,” in which the Devil makes an appearance to “the writer,” a recurring character who appears in many of the chapters between the stories:
[the writer] was lining up at the bodega and wondered if the Devil was going to proposition her—for her soul, that is. The Devil answered, suddenly standing behind her in line, holding a six-pack and a newspaper, that she could keep her soul to herself. The writer paid for her purchase and stepped aside. She apologized for being presumptuous. She had heard stories.
The Trump costume was just a costume. Even the Devil has his limits. But this doesn’t mean that we ever believe he has good, or even neutral, intentions. That very tension gives every interaction between the Devil and the writer the thrill of danger, as if at any moment she’ll blink and find herself roasting in pits of fire.
But for now the Devil craves something else: stories, of course, and good ones. “The Devil said stories were more than knowing things, facts. There was no soul in that. It was in the telling and the words, the spaces between them.” Is this a benign Devil? He’s looking for souls, yes; but not finding them in people, rather in stories. Lima’s Devil is relatable to readers because he’s one of them himself, and a voracious one. To a certain extent, this is a comment on why we all read: aren’t books ideally windows into the characters’ souls? Don’t we read to understand people better? To understand ourselves better? By consuming the soul of a story, we deepen our own. So, um, are we the Devil? ... Wait, is the Devil still Trump? Are we Trump? Does Trump read? … Whew! (Wait again: maybe he does if the story’s about him.) Either way, we have to keep reading to find out.
All of Lima’s stories are concerned with the movement of souls, but none more explicitly than “Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.” Its protagonist experiences all three afterlives as though she were blessed and damned simultaneously. While Heaven vaguely resembles an all-inclusive resort, Hell is eternally running through the Penn Stations of 2008, 2015, and 2016. Finally, Purgatory is a never-ending bus ride to see a dying friend. This Dantesque journey through the eternal planes illustrates the importance of time and transience to happiness. Interestingly, Lima manages to give purgatory a unique appeal. Logically it doesn’t seem better than Heaven, but it’s hard to say which one you’d prefer, given a choice.
Purgatory is the unspoken backdrop in many of Lima’s stories. The most obvious is “Porcelain,” in which the socially awkward protagonist, Bernard, fixates on an NPR story he heard of a rat climbing up someone’s toilet. “[Bernard] had dreamed of a rat, that night after he heard the story. In his dream, the rat rested on his pillow. It sat next to Bernard as he did his crossword puzzle.” While in his dream Bernard can befriend rats, in his waking life he can’t work up the courage to ask his coworkers to happy hour. (“What would he talk about? He decided happy hour was not for him.”) But that alone doesn’t make for the tragedy of Bernard. It’s his unvarnished loneliness. Just after deciding he wouldn’t like happy hour, he reconsiders:
[H]e could be wrong. By now he knew people were sometimes bad a predicting how different situations might make them feel. For example, he’d thought he would not miss Wanda when she left. He was, in a way, looking forward to it. That had been the most foolish part. Of course, he was miserable.
The matter-of-fact tone emphasizes his solitude more so than if he’d been crying. It’s obvious that his emotional prudence is also the cause of his problems, but who could help him fix that? Does he only have his dream rat to teach him to enjoy other people’s company, and his own?
One of the creepiest stories in the collection is “Anthropófaga.” The main character, Béia, has a tough life. She works long hours, can’t save money, and is getting over a breakup. Her main source of joy is a weird, capitalistic kind of cannibalism. The opening lines to the story are arresting:
She devoured tiny Americans that slid out of a vending machine. Their thin metallic plastic packages almost opened themselves when punctured. Emerging with their tiny hands on either side of the rip, they declared their nutritional value (calcium, sugar, fat, 350 milligrams of synthetic protein). So many times she decided to diet and promised no more Americans. But she always walked by with an eye on the spot between the Ruffles and the Doritos, salivating.
This could be a metaphor for the irresistible and destructive draw of American consumer culture: the diabolical powers of market forces over our better impulses. But there’s a great pleasure to reading this story at face value. Béia is consuming real people, people whose value has been reduced to figures representing their nutritional measurements. The general acceptance of that makes this piece terrifying. When she guiltily asks her coworker, Rosa, if she eats from the vending machine, Rosa shrugs. “Might as well enjoy it and not torture yourself. Things are hard enough, mi’ja.” Don’t torture yourself. Enjoy those little humans you’re chewing up and swallowing like an ancient bloodthirsty god.
Which might bring us to the writing workshop. “Idle Hands” will remind anyone who’s been in one of the unique test of patience it takes to read through several different people’s contradictory comments on your writing. This epistolary-adjacent piece captures how catty, jealous, and over-zealous fiction workshoppers can get. The story is framed as a collection of workshop members’ notes on an eponymous story which we never read in full. Or do we? In a certain way, the piece is haunted by this missing story. We see outlines of it and the workshoppers often mention a certain “Mr. D,” giving it a devilish element. By the end, you feel like you’ve also read the workshopped version of “Idle Hands.”
This story fits neatly into the book’s overall meditation on creation and creators. The book’s title, Craft, signals a self-aware collection of writing that is interested in exploring literary tools while also telling stories. This isn’t the first book to do that, but the craft at work here also references witchcraft. Throughout the book, writers are powerful beings, witches or even minor (sometimes bumbling) gods, capable of creating souls for readers, or Devils, to consume. But what is a soul? The eternity of personality? And does it change or is it static? The same question could be asked about a story’s meaning and reception over time. How our personalities, and our stories, exist in time and space is a major concern for this collection. In “Ghost Story,” the ghost of the writer’s future self is haunting her mother today. When the writer’s mother in Brazil tells her about the haunting, she guilts her into coming home to visit.
I always ended up going back to Brazil. With my brother’s engagement and now my mom’s ghost thing. I let my tourist other selves disappear in a little puff of blue smoke. In the reality of my apartment, I saw my keys on the couch, glinting in the sunlight.
It isn’t just the mother that’s seeing a future double of her daughter. The writer doubles herself every time she thinks about the places she could go if she weren’t emotionally obliged to return to Brazil. The tension between the writer, her imagined double, her future self, and her mother is surprising, relatable, and touching.
In the final story, “Hasselblad,” doubling, tripling, copies, and reprints are taken to an extreme. Divided into three parts, each featuring interactions between “Michele” and “the girl,” the story ensures that we’re never initially sure if the new Michele is the same Michele we saw in the previous section or if she’s “the girl” or if “the girl” is another girl or if she’s related to Michele … or not. Confusing? A bit. Fortunately, it’s an entertaining confusion inside a skillfully written story. The interactions between the Micheles and the girls center on photography. The parallels between form (or craft) and subject are clear. The women are interested in reproducing images, while they’re also reproducing themselves. The doppelgängers or faux doubles reappear with each generation, swinging around an infinity loop, giving the impression that personality is, in fact, eternal. But then the idea of a soul rears its everlasting head. Could you cut yourself free of the purgatorial loop and spin off into nothingness alone? Would you end up in heaven or hell?
Of whom is this book asking those questions? Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is certainly a writer’s book—the title alone seems to aim itself at the genre-loving literati. But its self-aware playfulness will appeal to the storyteller in anyone. It has humor, irreverence, thoughtfulness, and intelligence; but most importantly, it has a soul.
[Editor’s Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Jaime Mayer during our annual Kickstarter.]