This novel is a unique first person perspective from the view of the devil, Lucifer. Out of Hell, living in the body of a man who recently decided to commit suicide, Lucifer is taking a holiday under the guise of considering an offer from God. If Lucifer can live for one month free of sin in the body of this human man, he can remain in the man’s body for the rest of the vessel’s mortal life and return to Heaven at the end of it. Oh, and he has to ask God for forgiveness first too.
The Lucifer in this book is a version I have never seen depicted before. He’s not as evil as you might think, he doesn’t spend all his time torturing those who are sent down to his domain. He seems to love spreading his influence more than anything else, whispering in the wind with the hopes of getting mortals to act on their terrible thoughts. He is proud of the fact that more souls get sent to Hell than to Heaven, and from what he says it’s not even a close race. Even though his entire existence is spent in constant, excruciating physical pain, he would never go back to God’s rule under any circumstance. But when the offer that God places before him means getting a reprieve from that pain, he pretends to seriously consider the offer just so he can have a little vacation.
The book is written without chapters, just constant narration from Lucifer, and he is a real chatterbox. There are occasional conversations between Lucifer with either humans or angels, but mostly the novel consists of the devil reflecting on the entirety of his existence, from creation to the present. He goes over what he considers some of his greatest moments, what parts of the story we got wrong, time, and various other eternal worldly things. It was a lot at times, but it was interesting. I especially enjoyed his monologue on Eve. But what made me change my mind about enjoying the book to not being sure I liked it had to do with the ending.
The entire story was not ambiguous at all, everything was spelled out very clearly, until you got to the very end. I spent entirely too much time after finishing the book trying to confirm my uncertain conclusion that Lucifer returned to Hell once he left Gunn’s body. At the end of his trial period he was given the choice to return to Heaven, if he would do the unthinkable and ask God for forgiveness. It was pretty clear to me, due to the many times throughout the novel Lucifer stated that he had absolutely no intention of doing that, that he would be staying true to his word. Even when Rafael tried to intervene by revealing to Lucifer what God was considering, he still refused. Some may say this is unreasonably, dangerously, stubborn of him, but I am kind of impressed with how true to himself Lucifer was. Lucifer made a lot of really good points as to why he never regretted what he did and why he wasn’t willing to go back to living under God’s rule. I’m on his side.
But while I think it is pretty clear where he ended up, it wasn’t entirely crystal to me whether or not Lucifer made a side quest before returning to his kingdom. It was never mentioned if Lucifer could travel to Heaven at all, with the intention of just speaking to God or one of the angels, not for the purpose of returning. If Lucifer wanted to make a deal with God, as opposed to what occurred here, is it something that could have happened?
In any case, Gunn has a lot to deal with once he gets placed back into his body. And I’m not saying this in a, oh can you imagine the mess he had to deal with once he wasn’t possessed anymore way, but in the fact that you do actually get a few pages from Gunn’s perspective at the conclusion. And from the third to last line of the book, which I will not spoil for you, I think he was mildly aware, or at least had a pretty good idea, of what happened to him while he was in limbo.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 