A story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. In 2014 in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, where the Prophet-a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions-lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local dump, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael and the Prophet feels certain that she is his Big Fish, a messenger preordained by God to take his collection of end-times warnings to the White House.
Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter...into transcendent beauty ... Rather than pitting these seeming polarities against each other, Quatro skillfully mines the gray areas between them, the realms of ambiguity that are far more indicative of the human experience ... Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple.
Quatro embroiders a fragile and very sweet relationship between the outcasts ... Quatro is a rare novelist for whom a religious belief in good and evil is not merely a plot device but a genuine guide to describing reality. The striking final section of the novel is narrated from the omniscient point of view of the devil ... Intimate.
I can’t shake the sense that the pages feel warm to the touch. I see, in my mind’s eye, her sentences threaded with muscle and sinew, letters glistening with sweat and blood ... The structure of Two-Step Devil gestures to its characters’ painful and disrupted histories through its own resistance to teleology.
