I’ve been doing a lot of non-fiction recently, so here’s a couple of novels about the Devil:
Falling Angel
Falling Angel is a classic. There’s at least 70 editions of the book, and it was turned into a big Hollywood movie in the 80s with Robert DeNiro and Mickey Rourke. I’ve had a copy on my bookshelf for a long time, but I only sat down to read it recently. It was great. I had seen the movie years ago, and I had an idea where it was going, but I still found the book very suspenseful and very enjoyable.
Harry Angel is a private detective who has been hired to find a missing popstar named Johnny Favourite. The guy who hired him is a rich weirdo named Louis Ciphre. Harry finds himself in a world of murder, voodoo and Satanism pretty quickly.
It’s more of a hard-boiled detective novel with supernatural elements than a straight horror novel, but that’s what makes it so great. There’s lots of suspense, and I got through it in a couple of sittings. It’s a really fun book to read. It made me realise exactly what Richard Jaccoma was going for when he wrote his werewolf novels. (The first of those books came out a year after Angel Heart, the movie version of Fallen Angel, and I doubt this was a coincidence.)
If you haven’t read Falling Angel, you should.
Angel’s Inferno
More than 30 years after Falling Angel was published, Hjortsberg started work on a sequel. He finished Angel’s Inferno shortly before he died in 2017. It wasn’t published until 2020.
It wasn’t great. It starts where the last book left off, and the main character is now on the run. He heads to Paris and buys a lot of expensive clothes and eats some fancy food while plotting revenge. The characters and their interactions are enjoyable enough, but the suspense and mystery of the first book is almost entirely absent. The plot is modelled on that of the first book too, but the twist ending here was just a bit too ridiculous for my taste. This book was far longer too. It wasn’t absolutely horrible to read, but it pales in comparison to Falling Angel. I’m glad I didn’t spend 40+ years waiting in anticipation for this.
Nocturnal Revelries 
I bought Falling Angel when it first came out in the spiffy gold dust jacket, but never got into the sequel. The movie doesn’t do it justice in my humble. And Louis Cyphre is a crassly obvious pseudonym for the Devil. Hjortsberg also created the Devilish Darkness in his screenplay for Legend – Tim Curry in huge horns!
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