Comparisons between C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and Thomas Davis’s The Devil Likes to Sing are inevitable, but I can’t go there. When I tried reading Screwtape years ago, I just couldn’t get into it. (Let me assure the Lewis fans who just gasped in horror that I have read many of his other books.)
Timothy McFarland, the narrator of The Devil Likes to Sing, is ABD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Despite his failure to get a dissertation approved by his doctoral committee, he hangs around Hyde Park, developing a career as a hack writer of schmaltzy gift books. When his wife walks out on him over his self-possession and selfishness, the devil starts showing up. The devil sometimes looks like John F. Kennedy, sometimes takes on other guises, and sometimes appears to McFarland the way he shows up for the rest of us: merely in his head.
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