Book Review: ‘Never Hide from the Devil’

N.T. McQueen’s Never Hide from the Devil is not merely a historical reconstruction; it is a jagged piece of shrapnel from 1915 Van, pulsing with the frantic, localized energy of a city under siege. Through Suren Simonian’s raw and fragmented journal, the narrative avoids the sterile distance of an epic panorama, opting instead to lock into the wide-eyed, sensory unraveling of a boy watching his world catch fire. The prose itself mirrors this urgency, landing with a rifle’s recoil — taut, sharp and unforgiving. McQueen masterfully captures the transition of Van from a vibrant hub of Armenian culture into a suffocating perimeter of survival. 

The “City of Memory” is transformed into a landscape of tactical necessity, where the familiarity of childhood alleys becomes a labyrinth of life-or-death courier routes. By centering the story on Suren, the author forces the reader to confront the genocide not as a statistic of “20,000 dead,” but as a series of intimate betrayals and impossible choices. It is a coming-of-age story forged in the furnace of annihilation, where the playful exuberance of the “Big Guns” is systematically stripped away, leaving behind the hardened resolve of the fedayi.