Two-Step Devil

April 1, 2024

Quatro, whose Fire Sermon was a B&N Discover Great New Writers and Indie Next pick, writes about an unlikely relationship between two strangers--a 70-year-old man convinced that he's a prophet, and the teenage girl he rescues from being trafficked. The Prophet is sure that the girl is the key to getting his end-times warnings to the White House. Prepub Alert.

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July 15, 2024
Quatro (Fire Sermon) reckons with faith and the nature of evil in her daring and disturbing latest. The narrative centers on a 70-year-old man, known as the Prophet, who lives alone in a ramshackle cabin in the hollows of Alabama’s Lookout Mountain, where he carries on dialogues with a shadowy Lucifer-like figure whom he calls Two-Step. When the Prophet spies a girl bound by zip ties in the custody of two sex traffickers, he rescues the 14-year-old, who’s named Michael, and becomes convinced she’s a messenger sent by God. The Prophet carefully tends to Michael as she suffers through opioid withdrawal and later rebuffs her attempts to repay his kindness with sexual favors. Once Michael is well enough, the Prophet sends her to Washington, D.C., with instructions to deliver his divinely inspired message to the White House. But Michael has been harboring a secret from the Prophet, and she embarks on her own course of action. Quatro’s descriptions of child abuse can feel gratuitous, but she poses provocative questions about consent by drawing parallels between Michael’s sex work and Mary’s immaculate conception (“As if obtaining the consent of a fourteen-year-old exonerated Creator of the crime!” Two-Step says). It’s hard to turn away from Quatro’s electrifying vision. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA.

August 1, 2024
In 2014, a visionary 70-year-old man develops a bond with a captive teenage girl that could change both their destinies. The Prophet, who lives off the grid in a cabin near Lookout Mountain, Alabama, paints his divine visions and sells vegetables, biding his time until God calls him into action to send apocalyptic warnings to the U.S. president. One day, while the Prophet is hunting for supplies for his art projects at the town junkyard, a mysterious car pulls up at the gas station across the road, out of which emerges a bearded man in a vest, a woman with hair the color of a Coca-Cola can, and a teenage girl--who has zip ties on her wrists. The Prophet soon comes to believe that the girl is not only one of God's "Innocents" but also the "Big Fish," so he must save her from her captors. After a dramatic rescue, he brings her to his cabin to recuperate, and he realizes that he must send her to the White House with his prophecy about the cosmic battle that will threaten to destroy the U.S. if its people do not repent. A tender friendship develops between the girl, named Michael, and the Prophet as they wrestle with their pasts and the difficult choices they must make about the future. Tarrying in the background is the Two-Step Devil, hissing doubt about the Prophet's and the girl's divine destinies. Or, perhaps, Two-Step is merely telling the truth that the Prophet (and the rest of humanity) is too arrogant or afraid to reckon with: "The first humans did not fall; they rose.I lifted them into personhood," the Devil chillingly asserts. By alternating between perspectives and pushing the novel's formal boundaries, Quatro daringly explores the evils and mercies, large and small, that steer the courses of human lives. A searing and innovative allegory for our turbulent times.

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Starred review from August 1, 2024
Aging Winston the Prophet knows his best days are in the past. Holed up in a ramshackle cabin in the woods on Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, he paints vivid renderings of his visions of the end of the world. The Prophet's thoughts are constantly interrupted by the Two-step Devil, who delivers reality checks. While searching in a junkyard, the Prophet spots teenage Michael, a wisp of a teen girl, being taken away against her will. In her, the Prophet sees a messenger who will bring his word to the president and save the country from certain doom. Michael strikes a moving relationship with the Prophet after he rescues her, and she eventually agrees to be his emissary. Brilliantly paced and exquisitely detailed, this striking novel takes on such weighty themes as faith, humanity, and frailty without a touch of melodrama. Quatro (Fire Sermon, 2018) moves back and forth in time to flesh out the Prophet's hardscrabble past, history that shapes his present mission. The ending, with a special kind of forked alternative, is devastating precisely because we see it coming as clearly as the Prophet sees his visions. A spectacular masterpiece.

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