Deals with the Devil

Fayne’s novel explores spirituality, sacrifice, and salvation.

Just before the introduction to his debut novel, The Devil Three Times, Rickey Fayne includes a Laurent family tree. To Fayne’s reader, this is a helpful tool for keeping track of the book’s characters across its timeline. To Fayne’s Devil, the family tree is a map to salvation.

The book opens with Yetunde, a young girl on a slave ship bound for the United States who strikes a bargain with the Devil in order to survive what lies ahead of her. For generations to come, the Devil continues to visit Yetunde’s descendants — the Laurent family — offering them his own version of redemption in their darkest moments in pursuit of his own reentry into heaven.

The Devil Three Times is deeply rooted in Fayne’s personal experience as the born-and-raised West Tennesseean draws on Black spiritual traditions and the oral histories of the Black diaspora.

“With a voice and rhythm that zip and twang like our best-loved Black folktales, this epic family saga unfurls with tender precision, illuminating the dark and light of our very human natures to profound effect,” writes Dantiel Moniz MFA’18, UW assistant professor of English and author of Milk Blood Heat.

“This is a page-turning, rollicking novel that is both an intimate family saga and an elegy for the American experience,” writes New York Times bestselling author Nathan Harris. “This is what literature is all about.”

Fayne is a faculty member in the UW’s Department of English.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue