My dear Wormwood begins one of the most ingenious works of Christian satire ever written. C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters unfolds entirely through the correspondence of Screwtape, a senior devil of considerable bureaucratic experience, as he advises his eager but bungling nephew Wormwood on the delicate art of damnation. Wormwood has been assigned a young man in wartime London, and his task is simple: guide the "patient" gently away from the Enemy, as Heaven is known below, and safely into the arms of Our Father Below.
Screwtape's advice is a masterclass in inverted morality. Prayer, love, friendship and pleasure are hazards to be neutralised; pride, distraction, petty resentment and spiritual complacency are the tools of the trade. Through his silky, exasperated letters, Lewis illuminates the small, unglamorous temptations of ordinary life with devastating wit, showing how souls are most often lost not through great sins but through a gradual, comfortable drift.
As the patient falls in love, endures the Blitz and stumbles towards faith, the stakes of the correspondence sharpen, and Wormwood's failures carry consequences of their own. By turns hilarious and unsettling, The Screwtape Letters remains a piercing portrait of human nature seen from below.
