Jamie Quatro’s first novel, Fire Sermon, and her first collection of short stories, I Want to Show You More, both dealt with desire, especially the connection between the sacred and sexual, between fidelity and belief. Her second novel, Two-Step Devil, considers the destruction of the world, of a country and of individual lives. I found Two-Step Devil to be the strongest of her books, with a more interesting plot and characters who have rich backstories and frustratingly human tendencies.
Others seem to agree. Published this past fall, Two-Step Devil was the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. It was also named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2025 ALA Notable Book and a Best Book of 2024 by The Paris Review and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Quatro has received quite a bit of acclaim, from both secular audiences and publications explicitly motivated by religious faith, like Image and Commonweal. She has been the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo and Bread Loaf and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters M.F.A. program.
After Fire Sermon was published, Anthony Domestico commented in Commonweal that “Quatro is a true cartographer of desire, showing that the longings of the body and the soul aren’t two autonomous states but constitute a singularly vast and singularly wild territory. Her fiction is sexy, it’s theological, and it’s consistently and surprisingly both at the same time.”
In an interview with The Paris Review about a triptych of short stories, Quatro said, “You know, I keep thinking I’m going to write something new, something I’ve never written before. And I keep coming back to God and sex.” This is true of Fire Sermon and Two-Step Devil, though the way she comes at these themes in each novel differs.
The main character in Two-Step Devil is the Prophet (also known as Winston or Watchman), who lives in Lookout Mountain, Tenn., and believes he has been given a message from God to deliver to the president of the United States. He is a recluse in ill health, has been a widow for many years and is estranged from his son, Zeke. He is also an artist, recording his visions from God. At times, it seems he feels he is blessed to receive these visions; at other times, it seems more accurate to say he feels plagued by them.
The Prophet keeps his eyes peeled for what he calls the Big Fish—the one God will send him who can help him deliver his message. This turns out to be Michael, a female teenage victim of sex trafficking, whom the Prophet believes he needs to save by taking her away from her “managers.”
Quatro begins the first section of the book with an epigraph taken from Czesław Miłosz’s “A Song on the End of the World”:
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
This is an apt description of Quatro’s prophet—his physical description, his attitude, his vegetable garden and, most importantly, his obsession with the end of the world.
The novel’s prologue introduces readers to the character and his beliefs more fully, as well as to the Two-Step Devil who lurks throughout the book, haunting the Prophet. He’s a cowboy devil who wears a bolo tie and boots and is a natural performer. His background presence lends an urgency to the Prophet’s choices. Two-Step is slick and sinister, constantly chiming in as a voice in the Prophet’s ear. As a result, it is not always clear if the Prophet is talking to a real person or to himself.
The first section after the prologue, “Prophecy,” has yet another epigraph, this time from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Starlight Night.” It is in this section that readers learn more about the visions that the Prophet has had. It is also where we meet Michael (named for the archangel, although she’s a girl). She is almost 15, likely the same age the Virgin Mary was when Gabriel visited her. Ironically, Michael’s “manager” is named King. This is who the Prophet must rescue Michael from when he concludes she is the “Big Fish” who can help him.
One might note that Quatro is examining the (somewhat) current moment in America and religion’s role in it, though the story appears to take place pre-2016. “Jesus said to watch for the signs of the End like you’d watch a fig tree coming into bloom. You’re one of the signs, Michael,” the Prophet tells her.
At one point, the Prophet’s son, Zeke, visiting from Nashville, says to his father: “You’re free to think about it that way. I’m free to think about it my way. That’s the great thing about living in America.” With characters and conversations like these, Quatro seems to press down on the freedoms on which America was founded to discover how they hold up against other forms of belief and autonomy.
The Prophet is deeply concerned about America’s future. “Time, times, and half a time, America about to witness the wages of what it had done. His own time running short, too,” he thinks. As his own health is failing, he asks Michael to help him write a message like the ones he has read from prophets in the Old Testament: “The Word of the Lord that came to Watchman of Lookout Mountain in the days of Clinton, Bush, and Obama which he saw concerning [… ] America and the whole planet Earth.” He believes two wars are coming: The first will resemble other small wars and the second will involve the entire world. He paraphrases Scripture: “The Lord your God will fight for you. You only gotta be still.”
While the first section is narrated in the third person, the next section, “Song of Songs,” is told in the first person from Michael’s point of view. Quatro confessed in a podcast interview with Yale’s Center for Faith and Culture that giving Michael a first-person section was inspired by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner said he tried to write Caddy’s story four times and failed; Quatro thinks he felt that way because he never told the story from Caddy’s perspective.
Readers learn, through snippets of memory about Michael’s upbringing, what led her to work for King and about her current “problem.” As she tries to sort all of it out, she wonders, “Maybe God has different rules for different people, like there are different rules for different states.”
Michael remembers that at one point King told her: “No preacher ever fixed any of the world’s problems. Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King spoke from within the system and got themselves killed. A real king ignores the system. A real king goes behind the system and works to undermine it.” King also tempts her, like the devil in the desert with Jesus in Scripture, and says she “will get everything other people struggle for years to achieve […] you can have everything.” It doesn’t seem like Michael believes this—at least not any more—but she is just trying to have something, anything in which she can believe. Yet people also keep needing and taking things from her.
Again, in the Paris Review interview, Quatro explains, “Many of my characters abandon their Christian faith entirely, or actively preach heresy—especially in my forthcoming novel, in which the Devil puts on a play re-visioning the Gospel narrative with himself as the rightful Christ figure.” She also says, “I’ve wrestled with my faith, of course—in fact, I would say wrestling is the mark of a viable religious practice—but I’ve never abandoned it.” Now, as an Episcopalian, she says, “I come to worship and feel like I’m eating organic whole foods after years of processed meals.”
The part of Two-Step Devil she refers to above comes after Michael’s narration, in the section “Gospel.” It is a compelling dramatic struggle between the Prophet and the Two-Step Devil, written as scenes from a play. The final section, “Revelation,” comes after this struggle and is prefaced by the voice of the Two-Step Devil himself, saying, “You fleshsacks want to look away. You must bear witness.” This section shows us the world is “stuffed with trouble” and presents several endings for the Prophet and Michael—none of which are satisfying.
Part of me felt that this kind of ending was a bit cowardly on Quatro’s part. She did the same thing in Fire Sermon, where the lives of the characters were left broadly open-ended, and readers could choose their own adventure. I felt that there should be an honest ending with closure—good or bad—for these characters.
Perhaps, though, Quatro is up to something else in this case. The story closes on questions: Who is really in charge? Who do I believe could do something? The Prophet is obsessed with getting his message to the U.S. president, but what could the president do? Who can do anything about any of the destruction witnessed in the book—the Prophet’s disease, the abuse Michael has suffered?
Quatro’s Two-Step Devil instead presents a fractured, uncertain ending, and readers are left with a sense of despair. What do we do with this, with the state of the world? It seems to suggest it really is up to us to choose, to do something—which is perhaps a way of defeating the devil, of letting God’s work be done in and through us.
This article appears in September 2025.
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