THE DEVIL’S PRAYER by Luke Gracias (Review)

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley
in exchange for an honest review.

In the 13th Century, in order to save his life, a monk did a deal with the Devil, and as a result the Codex Giga, the Devil’s Bible, came into being. It was lost for centuries, then rediscovered, but by this time, twelve pages of the original manuscript were missing, the twelve vitally important pages known as the Devil’s Prayer.

It is said that one day a woman will give birth to the child of the Devil. And if this person ever gets his hands on the pages of the Devil’s Prayer, then all Hell will be let loose on the world.

When the story opens, we are in the convent of Sancta Therese, a few miles north of Zamora, Spain. There, during the Semana Santa (Easter Week), a secret ritual is enacted, as it has been every year since the 1200s, but this time, at its climax, a nun commits suicide by hanging herself from the bell-tower.

Meanwhile, in Australia, in a world as different as it can well get, a young woman called Siobhan Russo is informed by a priest that her mother, Denise, who has been missing from home for six years, has committed suicide in Spain. That she was a nun going by the name of Sister Benedictine. And that she, Siobhan, must travel at once to Spain, to collect in person a message her mother left for her.

It turns out that Denise, the mother, had done a deal with the Devil years earlier, in order to get revenge and healing after she had been raped and left paralysed. This rape and its consequences form a vivid short story which stands out as rather different from the rest of the book, and after reading it we identify with Denise quite as much as we do with her now grown-up daughter Siobhan. At that time, the Devil had healed Denise in exchange for the souls of her attackers. But her dealings with the Devil had not stopped there. The Devil later brought the child Siobhan back to life after she had drowned in their swimming-pool.

But I am telling you too much of the story. Read it for yourself. It is brilliantly researched and replete with fascinating details. And don’t be put off by all this about “the Devil”. This is a very real, very evil, Devil, a Devil it is almost impossible to say No to – and as the author says in the book, “God and the Devil – one does not exist without the other.” It is a story I shall never forget, and full of characters I shall never forget.

I visited the website http://www.devilsprayer.com and found some marvellous photos of the scenes where the more bizarre sections of the story are set. Here is one of them: