Book review: The Devil Wears Nada

★★★★★

TRIPP! Tripp, I’m beggin’ ya man, please keep me on your list of reviewers for future books! I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. Needless to say, I got absolutely nothing done yesterday.

Tripp’s quest to find God by first finding the devil may be as serious as it is bizarre, but it’s just so doggone funny. Tripp confesses that you can’t find God through philosophical argument, but then proceeds to search for Satan in precisely that logical manner, scheduling interviews with a number of religious (and anti-religious) figures. Along the way, Tripp finds Satan in a malfunctioning microphone, a cranky kitty, and a buncha God-robbin’ poor people who think it’s more important to eat than tithe. In fact, Satan hides just about everywhere—except around those darn Satanists—but each interview just adds to Tripp’s frustration in not being able to get a tangible hold on the slippery critter’s pointy tail.

Tripp can’t handle incongruity, by the way. He starts getting about as cranky as Cindy Jacobs’ possessed cat, and then has a hard time harnessing his cynicism, which leaves a lot of bewildered interviewees in his wake.  His research steers inexorably and frustratingly to an anticlimax, a Devil wearing nada, until, finally, trooper that Tripp is, he decides to go all in. He agrees to sell his soul to the Devil. No big deal, he figures: His belief in the soul has been dashed. He prepares a devilish concoction of soundtracks to hold him for several long lonely hours, locates a suitable “dirt crossroads,” sketches out a devils trap in the dirt, and waits to see if his offer will entice the old dragon. Hey, this is suddenly turning scary, because beneath Tripp’s now-nervous humor lies an undercurrent of serious flirting with the occult. It’s now or never. And what happens next is …

… aw, I can’t tell you. But my smile disappeared in the final pages, as a philosophical answer to Tripp’s search for Satan and God bubbled up from the underworld.