TWO-STEP DEVIL

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.