History Literature / TheScrewtapeLetters

** The Patient’s fiancé is named Dorothy in the audio drama, likely named after Lewis’ friend Creator/DorothyLSayers.

* SexIsEvil: {{Subverted}}. It is only evil when done the devils' way. The fact that the Patient's fiancee is looking forward to it rather pleases The Enemy.

* SympatheticAdulterer: Averted. During the finale, when Screwtape is attending a banquet of newly graduated tempters, one of the dishes was a casserole of adulterers. Unlike "delicious" damned souls, the ones in this dish had no great subverted virtues - just bland selfishness.

* InLoveWithLooks: Screwtape tells his nephew Wormwood that sexual taste was a demonic contrivance, designed to lead men away from women with whom they might find healthy and lasting relationships in obedience to God. He says they vary the tastes from time to time to accentuate certain vices, such as having men choose statuesque and aristocratic women to promote vanity, or faint and languishing women to help foster weakness and cowardice. He says that at the time of the writing (World War II), they were trying to get men to focus on women whose bodies were "scarcely different from those of young boys", noted to be a particularly fleeting form of beauty, in order to exaggerate women's fears of growing older, and also rendering them less willing, or capable, or bearing children.

Adaptations of the work include a 2009 audio drama on Family Radio Theatre starring Creator/AndySerkis (Gollum in ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' trilogy) as the voice for Screwtape, a comic book adaptation by Creator/MarvelComics in 1994, and a stage adaptation by Max [=Mclean=]. 20th Century Fox has held the film rights to the novel since 1950, but despite previous plans to partner with Walden Media to make a live action film adaptation with a 2008 release date, the project is currently in DevelopmentHell. (It's perhaps worth noting that Lewis himself considered the book [[HardToAdaptWork inherently unstageable and unfilmable]], [[invoked]] and once advised a playwright who wanted to adapt the book with a framing device to go ahead and make the framing device into its own play, leaving Screwtape out of it.)

---> An ever increasing craving for ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it's better ''style''. To get the man's soul and give him ''nothing'' in return - that is what really gladdens our Father's heart.

* BittersweetEnding[=/=]DownerEnding: Kind of. [[spoiler:The Patient is killed in a bomb blast, leaving behind his mother and fiancee, but he does go to heaven.]] If you have come to sympathize with [[spoiler:stupid little Wormwood]], though, this ending is not at all a happy one for him.

* TheChessmaster: Screwtape is a very good one (according to himself anyway), but there's even more talented Chessmasters in the lower levels of Hell (including [[{{Satan}} the Man himself]]). And quite a few Chessmasters on the other side, too, so that Earth is a single GambitPileup.

* AppealToObscurity: Lewis does one in the introduction where he laments that he couldn’t write the GoodCounterpart of this book, alleging that even if he could “write like Traherne” the result would not be believed. This refers to Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century devotional writer who wrote with ornate PurpleProse. Lewis's complaint is thus not only that such beautiful prose is beyond his own skill, it would never appeal to readers in the modern publishing market.

* AppealToObscurity: Lewis does one in the same article where he laments that he couldn’t write the GoodCounterpart of this book, alleging that even if he could “write like Traherne” the result would not be believed. This refers to Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century writer whom nobody reads anymore, Lewis thus implying that society is now so corrupt that true quality and virtue is gone if the name of one of history’s best writers is forgotten.