Explore "Saints and Sinners" by Lawrence Wright on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are three possibilities where Anton LaVey is concerned. The most likely is that he is a complete fake. It is also possible that he is a tortured psychotic with grand delusions. The most frightening possibility, however, is that he really is the Devil incarnate-perhaps without even knowing it.
He certainly looks the part. I first saw him getting out of a black Jaguar and coming through the glass doors of a restaurant with a blonde on his arm. His devilish appearance is cultivated, of course: the shaved head; the black slacks, black shirt and ascot, black leather jacket, and black fisherman's cap; the Leninesque goatee, also still shimmeringly black, although LaVey is now over sixty years old; and a tiny gold ear loop in his left lobe. That much, however, would describe most of the leftover beatniks still wandering around San Francisco. No, there's definitely something more, something sinister about this man.