The Psychology of Evil in Fiction: From Psychopathy to the Devil
Review of Charlene Elsby's 'The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty'
by Peter Clarke
What makes a person do destructive things for no good reason? Or hurt others needlessly and revel in it?
Psychopathy, for one thing. Psychopaths lack the ability to feel empathy for others, which gives them the capacity to hurt others for fun, or for no reason at all.
There’s also the personality type known as the Dark Triad, which is characterized by narcissism, Machiavellianism, and some level of psychopathy. In other words, “It’s all about me, I am willing to hurt you for my gain, and I don’t care how you feel.”
And then there’s the devil.
The devil is a story that lives in the back of the mind. It tells you what you want to hear, even if it’s not what you know to be right. The devil gives you the ominous sense that you’re capable to terrible things. And when you do those terrible things, the devil thinks that A-OK.
The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty by Charlene Elsby explores this idea of the devil. The story takes place in a trailer park where a young girl lives alone in the trailer she inherited after her mother died. She’s too young to be living alone, but the bills always get paid so no one seems to care. For the most part, this girl (who’s never given a name) leads an unremarkable life: she goes to school, she works at the trailer park’s diner, she dates a guy named Brian. But there’s something off about her. She has this thing with the devil.
“The devil thinks I’m pretty. The devil thinks I’m smart. … The devil’s always been there for me. I felt it when I did the things I’ve done.”
The book opens with these lines. And this sets a suspenseful tone for the whole book. As the reader, you know something bad is going to happen. You just have to wait for it.
Most of the book is a familiar coming-of-age story. A girl who’s anxious about the future meets a guy she likes. They fall in love (or lust, perhaps). She starts thinking that things could be better. The twist is that the girl is intent on self-sabotaging any hopes for a bright future. And she intends to debase and even destroy those closest to her while she’s at it.
Things get pretty over-the-top-gruesome toward the end. Think orgy, body horror, snuff film. It would be hard to describe the last 20 pages without terms like that. And they sort of speak for themselves.
But just like at the start of the book, when the girl is still sweet and innocent-seeming, there’s that question: who is this devil she keeps talking about, and exactly what power does it have over her? There are lots of clues throughout the book. Mostly the devil is mentioned whenever the narrator has done something morally questionable, or is thinking about doing something morally questionable. Once, after having sex with a friend, her mind gets fixated on “the devil in the ceiling stain above us.”
The girl doesn’t seem crazy, like she’s hallucinating. She’s too self-aware for that. The devil doesn’t seem real to her. It’s part of her story. It’s part of the way she makes sense of the fact that she’s never had a break in life, that every day is a lonely struggle. And the bad things she feels compelled to do? Well, that’s not me; that’s the devil.
“I needed the devil,” she admits. “The devil was what held me all together all the time.”
I recently wrote about why psychopaths make great characters. If a character can be cruel for no reason whatsoever, that’s significantly more terrifying than if they have a legitimate motive. I can’t tell if the narrator in The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty is a psychopath or a Dark Trial personality type. But the general logic of “psychopaths make great characters” certainly applies, and Elsby’s lead character is just as captivating—in an unsettling way—as any of the memorable psychopath characters from classic film and literature. Even if, ultimately, the devil is to blame.
The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty was released in October 2023 by Apocalypse Party. Follow Charlene on X @ElsbyCharlene.
Peter Clarke is the editor-in-chief of Jokes Review. Read his Substack newsletter The Decadence Project and follow him on Twitter @heypeterclarke.