Tracks for the Evening: Up Jumped the Devil, Cry Little Sister, People of the South Wind, maybe a little bit of this cover of "Crossroad Blues". Also, quite a bit of this. Warning, light spoilers.
It’s the car that really won it for me.
To explain: In
Michael Poore’s new rapscallion of a novel Up Jumps the Devil[1],
the Devil is the classic, deal making, guitar playing, crossroads meeting Devil. He’s got
all the evil you’d expect of, well, the first person ever to shake a fist at
the Lord God Almighty. But he does
bad with such style. He smokes most things in the book. He has sleazy love-affairs on live
TV with Not!Miley Cyrus. And he drives a Midnight Blue
1961 Lincoln Continental.
 |
| It's the one in front. |
See, it’s easy to write an evil character. You give him some puppies to kick, give
her some orphans to smack, it’s easy.
What’s hard is writing fun, creative
evil. That said, Michael Poore’s
Devil isn’t all that evil. He’s
not even sinister. It’s more that
he’s just very Chaotic Neutral[2]. He gives no real care to issues of
‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but more to things like ‘this is fun’ or ‘that guy’s an
asshole.’ It’s a rather
Blue-and-Orange Morality, and it does a great job of making the Devil a likable
character. But he’s also fairly
deep too. There’s a heavy
undercurrent of sadness in him, a world weariness. And quite a lot of anger. After all, “he got kicked out of HEavEN! And had his true love stolen by GOD! And his true
love had let him four different times and he hadn’t seen her for three hundred
YEARS!”
