Is Nick, the narrator of Me and the Devil, really Nick Tosches? There are certainly resemblances: Nick's an aging writer who lives in lower Manhattan and is familiar with the same cultural undercurrents as Tosches, an acclaimed musical historian and novelist (In the Hand of Dante). But the novelistic Nick is headed to some seriously dark places--places that could be even scarier if they proved to exist outside of Nick Tosches's imagination.
It starts when Nick picks up a woman in a bar. As they have sex, he bites her thigh and swallows a few drops of her blood. "It was as if I suckled on her very soul and the inmost mystery of her," he reports, and that experience, as well as the physical rejuvenation that follows, sets him off in pursuit of more young flesh. Eventually, he gets involved with a college student named Melissa--even though, on one of their earliest dates, he accidentally severs her femoral artery--and they fall into a weird conversational groove that caroms from Hermann Hesse to the shared linguistic roots of the words rape and rapture in classical Latin. Eventually, though, Nick realizes that his relationship with Melissa won't work if he drains her completely, so he needs to find other victims. He meets Lorna at an AA meeting; she instantly recognizes the desire in his eyes and, looking for a solution to her own traumas, surrenders herself to him.
Tosches plays up the Gothic aspects of his story, but with a hardboiled spin: "Somewhere along the line," he warns us in the opening lines, "something went wrong." In addition to the blood drinking, an eerie manuscript turns up, in Nick's own hand--yet he remembers nothing of writing it. And Lorna isn't the only one to recognize his vampiric tendencies; Keith Richards (yep, Keith Richards) also instantly figures out the situation and warns him to stop while he still can: "From what I saw, kicking it makes kicking smack look like a frolic in the daisies."
Just when you think you know where things are headed, though, Tosches abruptly changes gears. It's not just a plot twist, but an entire reframing--one that will likely frustrate some readers, but ultimately strikes closer at the novel's deepest psychological themes. Me and the Devil is a profoundly disturbing novel, even more so for refusing to disturb readers in the most obvious fashions. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com
Shelf Talker: By turns profane, obscene, perhaps even blasphemous, Tosches's fictional account of "the most diabolically f*¢&ed-up year of my life" is like a cross between William S. Burroughs and J.K. Huysmans.