A foolish mistake, it is, to expect the beast, because sometimes, sometimes, it is the flower’s turn to own the name.
In TSTME, an invitation is written to the devil, inviting him to town. When that invitation is answered, it’s answered in the form of a thirteen-year-old boy named Sal. I didn’t want to write the stereotypical devil. One of red flesh, horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. I wanted to present someone who is as unlikely to be the devil as possible, but because of his race, he’s immediately targeted and called “devil.” I remembered back to when my Papaw Landon was called racial slurs, including the devil, by whites in those communities he was trying to live in. But as we learn over the course of the novel that just because someone is called the devil, doesn’t mean he is.
On the opposite side of that you have Elohim, which is the name for God in the Hebrew bible. So, you have someone who is called the devil in Sal, and someone who is called God in Elohim. And yet, by the end of this novel, we realize the one who is called the devil does not act devilish, and the one called God does not act godly. It’s about taking those two things and turning them on their heads. And it’s about seeing for ourselves who these people are, regardless of their skin color.
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