“Just as the Prophet makes art out of detritus, Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter into transcendent beauty . . . Quatro writes with the musicality and command of a mystic poet. Her sentences are also propulsive; the novel is a page-turner that leaves readers feeling deeply invested in the fates of the Prophet and Michael, individually and together . . . Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, Two-Step Devil is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry. Like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.” — New York Times

“Two-Step Devil is in part an unusual father-daughter story, as Ms. Quatro embroiders a fragile and very sweet relationship between the outcasts . . . Intimately evoked . . . Ms. Quatro is a rare novelist for whom a religious belief in good and evil is not merely a plot device but a genuine guide to describing reality.”— Wall Street Journal

“In Jamie Quatro’s fiction, a person is a burning thing: a voracious creature, hot with emotional, sexual and spiritual needs; prey to the squalid demands of embodied existence…I can’t shake the sense that the pages feel warm to the touch. I see, in my mind’s eye, her sentences threaded with muscle and sinew, letters glistening with sweat and blood . . . Across Quatro’s oeuvre, there is no forgetting that selfhood is material: pulp and tissue and cuts . . . If Quatro has written a song for the frail fleshsack, she has, too, intimated humanity’s cowardice in storytelling, the entwined ‘horrific and beautiful’ realities we balk at, and in desperate self-preservation, refuse to witness.”— Washington Post