Satan Loves You: A novel by Grady Hendrix

Satan Loves YouTakeaway: No matter how serious the topic, sometimes it is good to just laugh.

Purchase Links: Kindle Edition

One of the chapters that I really enjoyed with David Dark’s Sacredness of Questioning Everything was about Questioning our Offendedness.  It is easy to be offended when people do not believe as you do or seem to make fun of what you consider essential.  David Dark has a useful understanding of being able to laugh at yourself and your beliefs.  Whenever you are offended instead of seeking after the understanding, hurt or incredulity that is often root of humor I think  it can help to build a bridge toward relationship instead of pushing people away.

I heard of Satan Loves You when a friend on Goodreads.com (a social network for readers) wrote a quick review of it.  It sounded like a fun bit of satire.  And I like satire and humor.  Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff and Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series are two very different takes on how different authors have attempted to make fun of religion through fiction.  (Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son is a negative example.)

The set up for this book is that Satan is a discouraged manager of hell.  He always has budget shortfalls (there is not much money to be made on damned souls).  Hell is falling apart because of lack of maintenance (which is an interesting take on torture of the souls in hell).  Dante’s basic framework of hell provides structure.  But past that basic structure everything is pushed to absurdity.

The Angels in heaven have decided to try and take over hell and so Satan keeps getting set up.  He is being sued on earth because a (crazy) woman claims ritual satanic abuse.  The court scenes are similar in humor to Christopher Buckley’s No Way to Treat a First Lady or Supreme Courtship (and I love Christopher Buckley, so that is pretty high praise).

This is an independent author and it is the authors’ only full length book in the Amazon store.  It is only $0.99, so if you find you don’t like it, no big loss.  But I enjoyed it, I thought it was quite funny (and definately sacrilegious.)

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