What is Satan’s Salesman?
Review
SATAN’S SALESMAN is a “light” horror novel by Matthew Davenport. The premise of the novel is a simple but effective variant on the old Faustian pact. In exchange for your immortal soul, you can have anything you desire as long as it is within the “value” of your soul (measured in points). This kind of industrialized post-Wallstreet take on the powers of Satan.
Shane, the protagonist, loses a high paying salesman job to a failing competitor after she makes a deal with Perdition Investments. The somewhat on-the-nose organization makes him a counter-offer, though. They’d like him to get people to sell their souls in exchange for wishes, betting on the short sightedness of mankind versus the proof of the existence of souls. You also have to believe in a soul to actually sell it and I think that’s a nice twist on matters. Shane is immoral enough to believe he can game the system, stay out of hell, and yet send endless numbers of other people there. He only has a three soul a month quota after all.
Shane is an appalling human being but a believable one because the only people he does care about are his fiance Maggie, his friend Dale, and himself. He has such contempt for Dale’s Catholicism that he can’t bring himself to respect the idea of good vs. evil when he’s dumped in the middle of it. The premise is accepting that, yes, you can take up a job for the Devil and see if you can stay ahead of the person who runs the system with some sly digs at the way capitalism is set up (in the “House always wins” scenario).
Satan’s Salesman is a horror novel but it is a horror novel in the Stephen King sense that its’ about how a “normal” human being can get caught up in supernatural events simply because he refuses to treat it as any different from any other job. At one point, he gets a good man to sell his soul for the “greater good” while blinding him to the fact he’ll be devastating his family both living as well as dead. It doesn’t take much of a pitch to get Shane to also feel like he’s not REALLY at fault for the horrible consequences of the things he does.
He’s delightfully scummy and just likable enough to believe people would be friends with him. Make no mistake, Shane is a villain protagonist and you know he’s going to make things horrible for everyone around him. However, you also don’t get the sense that Shane is necessarily stupid either and that is something that a lot of these Faustian stories go with. I also didn’t think Hell was stupid, which is the other way that they went. Shane reads the fine print, he just notes that he can work with that.
I did mention it’s a “light” horror novel and that may be confusing some readers with my meaning. Basically, this is very much on the PG-13 scale of things with very little violence and more like a Twilight Zone episode than genuine scares. It understands its premise is silly on the surface but devastating underneath. Shane deliberately avoids looking a the consequences of his actions whenever possible (until he’s forced to). Whether it appeals to you or not based on this description is very much a case of your mileage may vary. Still, I had a lot of fun with it and not every twist was foreseen.
The ending is great and I think it begs for a sequel or, at least, a continuation. This is a short book but definitely one worth the money. Infernalism is rarely given a good treatment in books due to how familiar it is to us but here, it works well because it is the banality of evil given just the touch of the diabolic and both made worse. As indie horror novels go, I give this one a B and B+ rating. I’m surprised it’s not been read and reviewed more.
