The Devil You Say by Elisa DeCarlo
~The Quick Take~
The Devil You Say suffers from unexpected biases and a substantially less likable Aubrey, yet still manages to keep some of its charms with an over-the-top 90s sort of humor. Far from perfect, it still should hold its own among fans of Strong Spirits.
~The Real Review~
Apparently, I do not cope with a global pandemic by reading. There’s just so much real shit going on in the world—I couldn’t chance fiction that could be real, too. Like, I absolutely adored the Seven Citadels series, but I might have never recovered if I read it in my current emotional state.
It took a month before I picked up a book, but after only a day or two, I stalled again. I needed a book where I knew what I was getting myself into. With sudden clarity, I realized that I’m in the middle of several absurd series that don’t lay down universal truths or make you confront what it means to be human or question morality. Now those I could read.
The two front-runners were the Daimbert series and the Aubrey Arbuthnot series. As the Arbuthnot books are quite short, and I needed an easy win, it was an obvious choice. Back to 1920s England!
The Devil You Say is the second book in the series, though it was published before Strong Spirits. It has a lot of similarities to its prequel: it’s quick, light-hearted, and absurd. It differs from its prequel in several ways, though, and not all of them positive.
One of the most stand-out differences was the style of humor. Strong Spirits, while quite funny, was dry. The Devil You Say relies on an exaggerated 90s sort of humor, of the sort where a gentleman might be forced to pretend to be his manservant’s, well, manservant. Sometimes this was a lot of fun—seeing Aubrey experience the flip side of his upper-class world naturally leads to hijinks. There were other moments, though, I can see being funny in real life, or funny in television, but somehow in writing it lacks that punch.
The best example I can think of is The IT Crowd*, specifically the “Work Outing,” episode.
Spoilers for the best episode of The IT Crowd.
Roy, Moss, and Jen go to a play. Roy and Moss need to use the restroom, but there’s a ‘toilet guy,’ who makes them nervous. They split up, Roy using the disabled restroom, and Moss using the staff restroom. They both get busted, and we watch an embarrassed Roy pretending to be disabled. The situation snowballs to ridiculous heights. When Jen sees him in a wheelchair, surrounded by other people in wheelchairs, she keeps her cool, asks him a few questions as if she doesn’t know him, then offers to grab him a drink. She turns around to the bar, only to be face to face with Moss—who also leaned into his lie out of embarrassment and is pretending to work for the theater.
End spoilers
I’m not sure anything on television has made me laugh more than that moment. But describing it, at best, gets a chuckle or two because it’s that sort of visual, immediate comedy that has to be felt.
Since The Devil You Say has plenty of humor, these one-off not-quite-funny moments of “Ah, yes, intellectually that’s quite humorous,” didn’t trip me up much. There were two things, though, that did.
Frankly, Aubrey is often detestable. He takes such umbrage with doing things he regularly expects his manservant to do and petulantly rages when his manservant (now playing the part of a lord) does things that would be expected of a lord. Aubrey in Strong Spirits was mostly sympathetic with some infuriating moments. Aubrey of The Devil You Say is largely infuriating with a few sympathetic moments. Were my opinion of his basic character not already formed, I don’t think I could have enjoyed The Devil You Say as much as I did, and I doubt I would have bought another book in the series.
Perhaps the most egregious, and most unnecessary, sin of The Devil You Say, though, is its treatment of Mr. Oakeshott. He’s a fat man, and the writing surrounding him is low-key cruel. I don’t understand it. It serves no purpose in the plot, it adds nothing to the writing, and most of the time it doesn’t even read like it’s supposed to be a source of (shitty) humor. It’s more that it’s Mr. Oakeshott’s one personality trait—he’s fat, he loves to eat, and his fatness and his eating habits are repulsive to his wife.
If Mrs. Oakeshott needs to be repulsed by her husband, there are other writing devices that could be used.
The Devil You Say was published during the 1990s, the decade of fat jokes, and nothing written in it would have seemed the least bit out of place or controversial by those standards. That’s not excusing it—cruelty is cruelty, full stop. It does explain how it made it through editing and beta readers and the myriad things that might have stopped it these days. And yet this shittiness felt surprising to me, simply because Strong Spirits felt so … aware that I genuinely didn’t expect to see anything not-right in The Devil You Say.
None of us are immune to these sorts of oversights, though, and my googling of Elisa DeCarlo gives me reason to believe that she’s the sort to look back at how she wrote Mr. Oakeshott with regret for falling into easy biases.
Now, with a few negatives out of the way, let’s end on a positive.
Strong Spirits was a slim little thing with an equally slim plot. It filled the 151 pages of the book well enough but wasn’t exactly robust. The Devil You Say’s plot feels grander, more definitive, and is far more interesting. You’d struggle to spin Strong Spirits into a longer story. The Devil You Say could easily be cleaned up and fleshed out into a full-length (campy, ridiculous) novel.
So while The Devil You Say doesn’t perfectly live up to its own expectations in the way that Strong Spirits does, it’s still a fun, quick read that folks left wanting more after Strong Spirits will probably enjoy. Just don’t read it first.
Fair warning to Wiccans, witches, and whatnot: this book does have witches, and they’re definitely of the stereotypical worships-Satan variety.
*Note to those late to the game: The IT Crowd is often amazingly funny. It also has one of the most horrific transphobic scenes I’ve ever seen and frankly, I can’t believe that episode is still, like, available on streaming services. This might be a ridiculous heads’ up for a show 15 years old, but shrug.
GoodReads public deets: 3.18 / 5 Average | 11 Ratings
