FindMyTBR

About Michael Easter

Black Easter is a fantasy novel by American writer James Blish, in which an arms dealer hires a black magician to unleash all the demons of Hell on Earth for a single day. The novel initially depicts the assassination of a Governor of California (a fictionalized version of Ronald Reagan) by a black magician working as a contract killer. The same magician is then hired to release every demon in Hell for a brief time period. However, the demons cannot actually be returned to Hell by the end of the novel. Their traditional opponent, God, has already retired and nobody else can compel them to return to Hell.

It was first published in 1968. The sequel is The Day After Judgment. Together, those two novellas form the third part of the thematic After Such Knowledge trilogy (the title is from a line of T. S. Eliot's Gerontion: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") with A Case of Conscience and Doctor Mirabilis. Blish has stated that it was only after completing Black Easter that he realized that the works formed a trilogy.

A shorter version of Black Easter was serialized as Faust Aleph-Null in If magazine, August–October 1967; the book edition retains the phrase as its subtitle. Black Easter and its sequel were later published as a single volume under the title Black Easter and The Day After Judgment (1980); a 1990 edition from Baen Books was renamed The Devil's Day.

Michael Easter writes about nyt:advice-how-to-and-miscellaneous=2023-10-15, New York Times bestseller, and Mind and body. Their best-known work is Scarcity Brain.

On FindMyTBR we track 5 books by Michael Easter, 5 of them confirmed as audiobooks on Spotify or Apple Books — including Die Komfort-Krise, La trampa del confort, and Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough (Unabridged). Full availability across Spotify, Apple Books, Audible, and Amazon is below.