A Faustian Bargain That Echoes Through Time: Rickey Fayne’s Bold Southern Debut https://ift.tt/G8isQej
If God won’t answer, is the Devil the only one listening? In Rickey Fayne’s debut novel, The Devil Three Times, history doesn’t just haunt the present — it barges through the door, dripping sea salt and blood, demanding space. Spanning eight generations of a Black Southern family in West Tennessee, the novel opens aboard an antebellum slave ship and a Faustian pact made in her bowels. A young woman, Yetunde, makes a desperate and fateful bargain with the Devil to preserve her bloodline — a deal that reverberates across the next two centuries, manifesting in the lives of her descendants caught in the perpetual push and pull between power and freedom, damnation and deliverance.
Fayne’s work starts off with an immediate bang – with the devil being thrown out of heaven and his desperate attempts to get back. By naming the two parts of the book “Paradise Lost”, and “Sins of the Father”, Fayne establishes an alternate universe of knowing and meaning-making straightaway.
Momma said it was the river woman who scooped up the water, mixed it with the dirt, and in doing that she made all the trees and the flowers and the people.
This subversion of the Eurocentric Christian regime and the myth of creation is powerful, and this moral and theological complexity is a big triumph; Fayne challenges the reader to consider who has been cast as the Devil in American history — and why. The Devil, here, is no cartoonish villain. Fayne reimagines him as both seducer and witness, an paradoxical embodiment of violence and longing, who yearns not for destruction but intimacy — to be seen. Instead of tracing its story in neat chronological order, the narrative is braided with changing narrators; its structure is ambitious and cinematic — shifting between voices, eras, and registers. This nonlinear form echoes the very nature of generational trauma: it does not flow neatly or chronologically — it coils, returns, resurfaces.
Each chapter of the book centers on a new descendant of Yetunde, whose lives are shaped — sometimes subtly, sometimes catastrophically — by the original pact with the Devil. There’s Lucille, a formidable conjure woman whose spiritual power is both a gift and a burden; Asa, who chooses to pass for white and severs ties with his family in pursuit of a fraught, fragile freedom; Louis and Virgil, brothers locked in a violent rivalry that echoes the biblical story of Cain and Abel, but with uniquely Southern and spiritual stakes; Cassandra, who communes with the dead and must decide whether her visions are a curse or a calling; and James, a father desperate to shield his children from the darkness he has inherited.
The psychological depth Fayne affords his protagonists is notable — in the slave-ship, Yetunde’s terror is visceral; her defiance, nascent but fierce. Lucille’s chapters, by contrast, are defined by her quiet intelligence and the moral weight of her choices. When we finally meet the modern-day descendants, Fayne shifts into a more introspective tone, exploring questions of identity and belonging in a world that has ostensibly left chattel slavery behind but remains haunted by its legacies.
From the outset, Fayne establishes himself as a writer with immense lyrical power and emotional depth. His characters and their sentences are steeped in Black Southern vernacular, alternating with the poetic cadence reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. His prose stands squarely in the lineage of Black Southern conjure literature as well — integrating tricksters, spells, and folk magic into a pre and post-Civil War setting, using them to explore both cultural survival and resistance. The South Fayne conjures is not merely a place but a metaphysical terrain: ghosted, burning, holy. Water is everywhere — oceans, floods, tears — and so is fire. The Devil Three Times joins a powerful tradition of Southern literature that acknowledges the land itself as witness and participant in the nation’s original sins.
Fayne’s novel is obsessed with contracts — legal, spiritual, familial — and who signs them, who inherits them, who tries to break them. The pact Yetunde makes on that slave ship binds not only her but all her descendants. Each of them confronts the consequences of a decision made long before they were born. Each must determine whether to continue the bargain — or refuse it and face what comes next. Fayne’s inheritance is not about the bargain alone — the characters inherit pain, power and the legacy of slavery, racism and resilience.
There is magic here, not as escapism but as a language of knowing and articulating what cannot be otherwise spoken — placing Fayne within the Black speculative tradition shaped by writers like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due.
Still, the novel is not without its rough edges. At times, its ambition strains its structure. Secondary characters sometimes are reduced to chiming in and out, more archetypal than fully realized. There are moments when the prose threatens to overwhelm the story — when metaphor and lyricism swell to the point of risking and obscuring narrative clarity. But these are the excesses of a writer unafraid to experiment, and in a debut, they are welcome ones. The Devil Three Times is a story that resists closure because the history it grapples with unresolved remains. Fayne doesn’t offer easy redemption, but the possibility of reckoning with Black trauma and history. The Devil Three Times doesn’t just ask what it means to make a deal with the Devil, it asks what it means to survive one.
Fiction The Devil Three Times
By Rickey Fayne
Little Brown and Company
Published May 13, 2025
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