I Accidentally Bought Satan Loves You by Grady Hendrix, and I’m Not Mad About It
Some books, you plan to read. Others just show up in your life like they have their own agenda.
That’s what happened with Satan Loves You. I don’t remember buying it. Maybe it was a late-night impulse purchase, maybe it was one of those “add to cart and forget about it” situations. Either way, it sat on my shelf, completely ignored, until after I’d already torn through My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör.
I picked it up, assuming it would be another dose of Hendrix’s signature mix of horror and humor—something spooky, something clever. What I didn’t realize? This book was out of print. A limited run. A little harder to come by than I thought. And now, I kind of love that I stumbled into it by accident.
Hell is a Job No One Wants
If you’ve read Grady Hendrix, you know his real talent isn’t just writing horror—it’s finding the horror in everyday systems. Haunted retail stores. The terrifying social politics of high school. The mundane things we don’t think about, turned against us.
But Satan Loves You? This one goes full-on absurdist satire. The premise is brilliant: Hell is less an infernal pit and more a broken corporate system. Overcrowded. Underfunded. Falling apart under the weight of its own inefficiencies.
Satan isn’t some terrifying prince of darkness—he’s just done. Tired. Fed up with his job. He doesn’t even enjoy tormenting sinners anymore, but Heaven keeps dumping them on his doorstep. Meanwhile, his demons are overworked, there’s never enough punishment to go around, and morale is low.
Think less The Omen, more Office Space, but if the bosses were angels and the interns were handling eternal damnation quotas.
A Raw, Unfiltered Version of Hendrix
You can tell this is an early book. It’s looser, faster, and less polished than something like The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. The pacing is wild. The jokes are ridiculous. There’s no slow buildup—it throws you straight into the madness.
It’s also not scary. At all. If Horrorstör was Hendrix’s take on haunted houses and My Best Friend’s Exorcism was a love letter to ‘80s horror, Satan Loves You is just pure chaos. It reads like someone let a comedy writer loose in a theology class and told them to go nuts.
Final Thoughts: A Book That Found Me
Would I have gone out of my way to find this book? Probably not. But there’s something cool about knowing I ended up with a rare copy of something I actually enjoyed. It’s weird. It’s messy. It’s not what I expected. And honestly? That kind of makes it perfect.
If you ever see Satan Loves You in the wild, grab it. You never know when a book like this will drop into your life again.
Oh, and did I mention it’s kinda worth something?
