C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, a 1942 satire featuring a senior demon.
The book is presented as a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to his nephew Wormwood. Screwtape offers advice about tempting a human subject, allowing Lewis to discuss moral choices, distraction, pride, and spiritual habits through an intentionally inverted viewpoint.
The Screwtape Letters was first published in book form in 1942, after portions had appeared in the Anglican periodical The Guardian. Lewis’s use of demonic correspondence creates satire: the demons describe wrongdoing as professional success and treat human moral progress as a threat.
The work is sometimes mistaken for a conventional fantasy novel because it uses invented demons and a fictional correspondence. It is better classified as Christian apologetic satire, and its unusual structure makes the reader infer Lewis’s arguments from the demons’ hostile perspective.