THE WORD “PROPHETIC” gets thrown around a lot in Christian circles. The adjective carries both an ancient heft and a forward-looking fire, the perfect jolt of biblical energy for the nouns that need it: a prophetic book, a prophetic sermon, a prophetic Instagram infographic. But living prophets, especially the self-anointed ones, aren’t so easily marketable. They’re stubborn and strange, somehow arrogant enough to believe they speak for an invisible God who turns out to be, more often than not, extremely angry at large swaths of humanity.
Two-Step Devil, the second novel of rising literary voice Jamie Quatro, places one such character in the contemporary South. Known simply as The Prophet, Quatro’s lonesome protagonist lives in the kudzu-entangled backwoods of northeastern Alabama, where he paints visions of impending holy war on junkyard scraps. He’s the kind of person who can “walk around behind the world’s curtain” — glimpse the spiritual stakes behind the drudgery of familiar, if fragile, social conditions. After rescuing a teenage girl from a sex-trafficking scheme, he’s confident he’s found the one who will deliver his apocalyptic message to the White House. While he’s frail and tormented by self-doubt, she’s young and, in his eyes, innocent. Meanwhile, the girl, Michael, must pull off an urgent mission of her own.
Two-Step Devil is an electrifying, ambitious work. In addition to the searing social realism of Quatro’s depiction of human trafficking, the foster care system, and patchwork reproductive rights, the novel also serves as a theological thought experiment. As he tries his best to be faithful, The Prophet is frequently visited by the titular Devil himself, taking the form of a two-stepping cowboy. More the accuser of Job than the horned gremlin of popular culture, this incarnation of evil gives voice to the questions that have haunted believers for centuries: Could a good God really allow all this suffering? And what the hell can you do about it?
In one scene, Two-Step taunts — or maybe admires — The Prophet’s faith. “Oh, my beloved, out here on the margins, doing for the world what no congress or president or army could ever do. Believing in the old, old story.”
Universal as these spiritual matters are, they never smother the rich particularity of the novel’s setting or characters. This is a Southern tale, thrumming with the sounds of end-times Pentecostal preaching and “buzz-saw cicadas.” The Prophet has a libertarian distrust for all authority but God, including the “Unholy American Trinity”: big business, government, and church. For her part, Michael is pragmatic and observant; the parts of the novel she narrates are some of the most arresting. The two build a delicate trust — in each other, and in the possibility of changing fate.
In one of The Prophet’s visions, he finds himself in the middle of a crowd marching unthinkingly off a bridge.
“He turned around and only then did he feel the invisible wave shoving against him,” Quatro writes. “As long as he moved in the same direction as the wave, he didn’t know it was there. It was only in going against it that he felt its strength.”
As the characters come to understand, it’s only in going against the wave of exploitative social and economic systems that they feel their own strength too.
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