Which C.S. Lewis book presents the Christian faith through the fictional demon Screwtape?

The C.S. Lewis book featuring the fictional demon Screwtape is The Screwtape Letters. Published in 1942, it takes the form of letters from a senior demon advising a junior tempter.

Screwtape’s letters address temptation, distraction, pride, fear, and self-deception. Lewis presents the advice from the demons’ perspective, creating irony: readers must infer the moral and spiritual lessons from instructions intended to lead humans away from goodness. The junior demon is named Wormwood, while Screwtape serves as his experienced supervisor.

The book was first published during the Second World War, when Lewis was also becoming widely known through radio talks about Christianity. Those broadcasts later contributed to Mere Christianity, a nonfiction work with a very different structure. The Screwtape Letters is a fictional satire, not a straightforward theological textbook.

Its epistolary form is the central identifying feature. Each section is framed as correspondence, and the unusual viewpoint makes the book one of Lewis’s most distinctive works of Christian apologetic fiction.