Overview

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE 2025 'Compelling . . . I raced through this multi-generational, magical realistic story' DAILY MAIL 'A page-turning, rollicking novel . . . From the first page, I was spellbound' NATHAN HARRIS, New York Times bestselling author of THE SWEETNESS OF WATER The Devil first visits Yetunde aboard a slave ship heading to America. Her home burned to ash, she lies shackled in the belly of the ship with only her dead sister's spirit for company. Worse, she has a caught the eye of a white man. To survive the hell that awaits her, the Devil offers his protection and a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice. Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde's mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits her descendants in their darkest hour of need. There's Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, the white-passing son of a slave; Louis and Virgil, a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, a girl who speaks to the dead; James, a father struggling to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too? '[An] exuberant slice of Southern gothic . . . Fayne follows Percival Everett and Andrea Levy in stressing the rich emotional lives of their characters' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Fayne's imaginative narrative illustrates how the choices made in each generation ripple through the next' WASHINGTON POST 'Ambitious, rollicking, heartbreaking, multi-vocal . . . it demands to be read over and over' MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE

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Reviews

Ambitious, rollicking, heartbreaking, multi-vocal . . . In Fayne's witchy, earthy rural Black Southern genealogy of struggle, the past is as real as the now. The consequences of everything we have done and not done are ever-unfolding . . . The Devil Three Times demands to be read over and over * Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Fayne's imaginative narrative illustrates how the choices made in each generation ripple through the next * Washington Post * Fayne's debut novel does not lack for ambition . . . this family history contains magic and despair, migrations and hauntings - and echoes of the country's complex, often painful racial history writ large * NPR * [An] ambitious debut . . . the prose is consistently crisp and suffused with a feeling of hauntedness. A complex meditation on Black history with a Mephistophelian twist * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) * Lively, irreverent . . . Fayne beautifully evokes each character's unique voice and essence in dialogue and description . . . Drawing broadly on spiritual traditions, folklore, and history, Fayne dramatically reimagines the origins of centuries of Black history and the quest for freedom in the Devil's unexpected backstory * Booklist * A monumental debut. Fayne is a voice to be reckoned with . . . A book that embodies Black America in the past, present, and future * Debutiful * A major new talent announces himself with The Devil Three Times. Rickey Fayne has written a structurally inventive novel that challenges nearly everything we've been taught about God and the Devil and the usefulness of Jesus's love for Black folks. This book is daring, and it challenged me at every turn. I was also deeply moved by its soulful belief in a universe in which we are all connected across generations * Attica Locke, New York Times bestselling author of Guide Me Home and Bluebird, Bluebird * A debut of enormous ambition that succeeds on every level. This is a page-turning, rollicking novel that is both an intimate family saga and an elegy for the American experience. Not since James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain has a debut conveyed Black spirituality with such passion, style, and brio. From the first page, I was spellbound, and was left devastated by the novel's end. This is what literature is all about * Nathan Harris, New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water * Rickey Fayne makes deep folklore and African American oral tradition feel alive, and thrilling. In a voice that is as humorous as it is wise, Fayne paints an unforgettable portrait of one family's journey through the peculiar landscape that is America * Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness * Rickey Fayne's extraordinary The Devil Three Times is a book that understands both the sweep of history and its indelible characters' most intimate thoughts. Polyphonic, complex, heartbreaking, beautiful, enveloping, full of the devil and full of grace, this brilliant book is like nothing you've ever read. It reads like music, lore, history, and life itself -- Elizabeth McCracken, bestselling author of THE HERO OF THIS BOOK and BOWLAWAY A brilliant gospel chorus of resilience and humanity. We cover generations with storytelling that is equally smart, sexy, propulsive, and inventive. It's a scary novel that holds armfuls of beauty. Whole pages will stick with you, as they've stuck with me. Rickey Fayne's talent is a joy to behold -- Gabriel Bump, author EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG and THE NEW NATURALS If Milton taught us something sexy about the Devil, this deliciously sacrilegious and profane debut by Rickey Fayne thrusts the dark and needy anti-hero through the sloppy heart of American nation building. In The Devil Three Times, the Laurent family and their black winged guardian - their triumphs or subjections, from the plantation system to the heavenly plane - will sing their way into the consciousness of any reader ready to listen. Fayne's voice triumphs at the nexus of intimacy and violence, reminding us never to look away from what we all, under some banner of fear or righteousness, once dared to want -- Joseph Earl Thomas, author of GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER and SINK

Fayne follows Percival Everett and Andrea Levy in stressing the rich emotional lives of their character and the wide streak of subversion running through every plantation. In this exuberant slice of Southern gothic, where ghosts roam and magic shimmers, slavery is a sticky web trapping and entangling everyone it touches * The Financial Times * Ambitious, rollicking, heartbreaking, multi-vocal . . . In Fayne's witchy, earthy rural Black Southern genealogy of struggle, the past is as real as the now. The consequences of everything we have done and not done are ever-unfolding . . . The Devil Three Times demands to be read over and over * Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Fayne's imaginative narrative illustrates how the choices made in each generation ripple through the next * Washington Post * Fayne's debut novel does not lack for ambition . . . this family history contains magic and despair, migrations and hauntings - and echoes of the country's complex, often painful racial history writ large * NPR * [An] ambitious debut . . . the prose is consistently crisp and suffused with a feeling of hauntedness. A complex meditation on Black history with a Mephistophelian twist * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) * Lively, irreverent . . . Fayne beautifully evokes each character's unique voice and essence in dialogue and description . . . Drawing broadly on spiritual traditions, folklore, and history, Fayne dramatically reimagines the origins of centuries of Black history and the quest for freedom in the Devil's unexpected backstory * Booklist * A monumental debut. Fayne is a voice to be reckoned with . . . A book that embodies Black America in the past, present, and future * Debutiful * A major new talent announces himself with The Devil Three Times. Rickey Fayne has written a structurally inventive novel that challenges nearly everything we've been taught about God and the Devil and the usefulness of Jesus's love for Black folks. This book is daring, and it challenged me at every turn. I was also deeply moved by its soulful belief in a universe in which we are all connected across generations * Attica Locke, New York Times bestselling author of Guide Me Home and Bluebird, Bluebird * A debut of enormous ambition that succeeds on every level. This is a page-turning, rollicking novel that is both an intimate family saga and an elegy for the American experience. Not since James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain has a debut conveyed Black spirituality with such passion, style, and brio. From the first page, I was spellbound, and was left devastated by the novel's end. This is what literature is all about * Nathan Harris, New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water * Rickey Fayne makes deep folklore and African American oral tradition feel alive, and thrilling. In a voice that is as humorous as it is wise, Fayne paints an unforgettable portrait of one family's journey through the peculiar landscape that is America * Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness * Rickey Fayne's extraordinary The Devil Three Times is a book that understands both the sweep of history and its indelible characters' most intimate thoughts. Polyphonic, complex, heartbreaking, beautiful, enveloping, full of the devil and full of grace, this brilliant book is like nothing you've ever read. It reads like music, lore, history, and life itself -- Elizabeth McCracken, bestselling author of THE HERO OF THIS BOOK and BOWLAWAY A brilliant gospel chorus of resilience and humanity. We cover generations with storytelling that is equally smart, sexy, propulsive, and inventive. It's a scary novel that holds armfuls of beauty. Whole pages will stick with you, as they've stuck with me. Rickey Fayne's talent is a joy to behold -- Gabriel Bump, author EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG and THE NEW NATURALS If Milton taught us something sexy about the Devil, this deliciously sacrilegious and profane debut by Rickey Fayne thrusts the dark and needy anti-hero through the sloppy heart of American nation building. In The Devil Three Times, the Laurent family and their black winged guardian - their triumphs or subjections, from the plantation system to the heavenly plane - will sing their way into the consciousness of any reader ready to listen. Fayne's voice triumphs at the nexus of intimacy and violence, reminding us never to look away from what we all, under some banner of fear or righteousness, once dared to want -- Joseph Earl Thomas, author of GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER and SINK

Author Information

Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in the New York Times, American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and The Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern, over-churched upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors' experiences. He has received support for his writing from Tin House, Community of Writers, Kimbillio, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, Willapa Bay, and MacDowell. Currently, he teaches fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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