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Best-selling novelist Piers Anthony creates fresh, original takes on age-old themes like love and death. In For Love of Evil, he adds a delightful new chapter to a series that has captivated millions. Parry's promising life as a musician and apprentice in the arts of White Magic got thrown off track by the violent death of his beloved. Led down a path of depravity by a harlot demoness, Parry has lived a long, corrupt life that may finally be coming to an end-unless he can defeat Lucifer himself at the gates of Hell and become the new Incarnation of Evil. Completely accessible as a stand-alone book, For Love of Evil at the same time provides a fresh view of events from previous Incarnations of Immortality titles, such as Wielding a Red Sword and Being a Green Mother. Narrator Barbara Caruso brings just the right blend of adventure and humor to this truly enchanting tale.… (more)
User reviews
In For Love of Evil, Piers Anthony returns to what made this series so enjoyable in the first place: The mortal person coming to terms and understanding their new role as an incarnation. The first three books in the series accomplished this, but the formula went astray somewhere around book four.
This book could be read on its own, but I think is a stronger novel if you suffer through the first five books. On to the last: And Eternity.
In For Love of Evil, the human who becomes the incarnation of evil, Satan, is troubled by the nature of good versus evil and decides to end it all in a death duel with God.
The first half, the main character's fall from grace, would have been interesting if it were more
Parry, an orphan, is taken in and is accidentally adopted by a wizard who teaches him the benefits of white magic and how it can be used to help others. A musician and adept white magician, Parry
The first two thirds of the book is original material about Parry, a 13th century sorcerer who does the Pygmalion thing on a peasant girl to get himself a perfect wife and loses her to the Albigensian crusade (in a scene, incidentally, that puzzled me for years with its offhand description of rape-ready bondage. I still don't think it would work as described.) He then becomes a monk, founds the Inquisition, foils Lucifer a number of times, and then falls to temptation in the form of first his ghostly wife in a willing and nubile body, and then the demoness Lilith. And then he defeats Lucifer and in doing so becomes his successor, Satan.
So. That happens. It's actually the least appallingly sexist book of the three I've reread, despite the ridiculous amount of sex. Partly this is because the time period makes things like arranged marriages marginally more palatable, partly because to make Parry ultimately sympathetic, he has to be an extra-good guy, and partly because the foes are the medieval Catholic church and/or Inquisition, against whom almost everyone looks liberal.
The last third of the book is the aforementioned recap section, where Parry describes his conflicts with the other Incarnations from his point of view. This is handy because the ones he focuses on are Fate and Nature, which always saved me from reading Anthony's unbearable attempts to write female protagonists. This section is chock-full of male-gaze ick, but Parry remains a sympathetic character as he struggles to understand his role as the devil while still being a fundamentally good, compassionate person. (In a series of minor scenes, he befriends the god of the Jews and arranges for the Holocaust to unhappen.) He also approaches God (the prime Incarnation of Good, the Christian god, which is finally justified by explaining that He has the most followers) and discovers that he is locked in narcissistic contemplation and basically out of action. This sets up the final book in the series...
...Which I am not reading. It contains, as I recall, a new female protagonist, Parry's ghostly ex-wife, and an urban prostitute of color. It goes about as well as you'd expect it to.
Really, this is the only book in the series that holds up at all. I'm not sure why it does, to be honest. Despite my crack about Del Rey above, the last two books in the series were published by Avon - perhaps the new editor filtered out the worst of it. It's still not really worth keeping around, but I am somewhat relieved that my 12-year-old self wasn't a complete moron.
Here is the tale of a man who had the love of his life taken from him by a
Much as he did on earth, he tries to restructure hell and organize it to make it more efficient (the bureaucracy is just as terrible in hell as in other places). But he doesn't seek to do undue harm, and in fact only acts ill to the other incarnations because of the way their predecessors treated him.
A very intriguing book that introduced concepts of religious natures and indeed of the concepts of Good and Evil.
I'm afraid that the next book, which I believe is about God will not be nearly as interesting or as intertwined with the rest of the series...we shall see!
Parry was the adopted son to a very competent sorcerer. Even though he was not the sorcerer’s biological offspring he proved to have an aptitude for magic as well as having an uncommonly gifted singing voice. When his beloved wife Jolie and his father die in the
After reading the first five books in this series, much of the middle part of this story is recapped from the other books, but from Parry’s POV. Where Parry came from and how he obtained the Office of Evil and became an Incarnation is an interesting pathway that is new though. And what happened to him at the end of Being a Green Mother is revealed. The setup is now complete for the final book in the series and I can’t wait to get to it!
Now, a few words on the story itself. There are a few inconsistencies and at times the writing is a bit simple, but the overall storyline is just as enthralling to me now as it was when I read it two decades ago. I love, love, love this series and I most especially love Parry/Satan. I mean, who doesn’t love a bad boy who isn’t all bad?