Newly reissued by Penguin Classics, Ray Russell’s short novel The Case Against Satan is a stranger book than it first seems. It is, to an extent, the story of an exorcism–but as unsettling as the possibility of demonic activity in the narrative is, Russell’s telling also implicates bigotry and at least one patriarchal institution along the way. I talked with Laird Barron, who contributed a foreword to this new edition, about this novel and Russell’s literary legacy.