What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1942 novel about demonic advice to a tempter?

C.S. Lewis’s 1942 novel about demonic advice to a tempter is The Screwtape Letters. It is presented as a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood.

Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to influence a human “patient.” Lewis reverses the usual viewpoint of religious fiction: readers see temptation, prayer, distraction, pride, and repentance through the imagined bureaucracy of Hell. The method creates irony because the demons’ advice reveals the moral failures they are trying to encourage.

The book began as a set of pieces connected with wartime broadcasting and was published in book form during the Second World War. It is not a conventional dialogue or a handbook of demonology. Instead, its epistolary structure and satirical voice make it one of Lewis’s most distinctive works of Christian apologetic fiction.