Satan Speaks! | Anton Szandor LaVey

Satan Speaks! is Anton LaVey’s last laugh from the black house at the end of the American century. Completed only days before his death in 1997, this final collection gathers sixty short essays from the founder of the Church of Satan: cranky, funny, savage, sentimental when it suits him, and allergic to all respectable stupidity. Here LaVey takes aim at modern herd behavior, occult frauds, social cosmetics, erotic absurdities, moral fakery, and the dreary middlebrow pieties that pass for enlightenment.

The book has the quality of a late-night monologue delivered by a man who has seen behind too many curtains and found the wizard drunk, broke, and wearing rented horns. With a foreword by Marilyn Manson and an introduction by Blanche Barton, Satan Speaks! is not a grand system-builder’s manifesto so much as a final dispatch: LaVey as raconteur, misanthrope, showman, and diagnostician of civilized rot. The Devil, here, does not whisper temptations. He heckles.