Chapter seven of The Chronicle of Young Satan is the darkest chapter of the season, and there’s no way to soften it. Nikolaus is going to drown in twelve days — Satan has already told the boys so — and the chapter is an unbearable countdown to a death his friends know is coming and can’t prevent or explain. He drowns trying to rescue a missing girl, Lisa Brandt, who drowns with him. Twain calls those final eleven days some of the most precious of Theodore’s life, and somehow that’s not a contradiction.
We dig into how the grief radiates outward from there. Lisa’s mother curses God and swears never to pray again; a carpenter seizes her daughter’s body as payment for an unpaid debt and buries her in a cattle yard, reported with a matter-of-factness that’s almost more disturbing than outrage would be. When the boys beg Satan to help the grieving mother, he does — by rewriting someone else’s fate without that person’s knowledge or consent, sending a man named Fisher to hell in the process for something he does in a moment of anger that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Satan can’t understand why this troubles them. He’s never felt sorrow. He only understands it theoretically.
We also get into purgatory — Satan claims it’s been discontinued for not paying for itself — and an honest tangent into “souling,” the real historical practice that became trick-or-treating. This is late, bleak, fully cynical Twain, and we walked away convinced he might be darker than Poe ever was.
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