Sabrina Lancaster is completing a doctorate at NYU Law School. The subject of her dissertation is the opinions of Mariano Scaglietti, a Supreme Court Justice famed as much for his acerbity as his intellect. After the Justice’s death the estate hires Sabrina to catalog his papers, and among them she discovers the draft of a letter, a disturbing one. The intended recipient is a wealthy recluse, Aneurin Bronaryre, whose London-based lawyer reveals that, among other idiosyncrasies, his client believes himself to be the Devil.

The Devil in this case is an urbane Englishman who, although physically in his thirties, claims to have come into his current incarnation in the Seventeenth Century, and whose earliest memory as a young boy is witnessing the execution of Charles I, where Cromwell supposedly gave him a coin, the same ‘Oxford Crown’ currently in the Ashmolean Museum—an object he covets. He purportedly came to self-understanding through expulsion from Oxford, incarceration in the Tower, and the poetry of John Milton. His motives for having decided to defend himself in print are unclear.

Sabrina is unsure whether this is some sort of total immersion technique—a writer’s version of the actor’s Stanislavski method—or if Bronaryre is simply delusional, but she accepts a position as the Devil’s amanuensis, and so begins a journey, both real and psychological, taking her from the New World to the Old: part Grand Guignol masque; part Alice-in-Wonderland fairy tale; part psychedelic phantasmagoria.

Meanwhile, the Devil tells his tale.


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