The Devil Himself is John Hughes's third collection of poems.

Nicholas Murray has written in the TLS, 'His poems move often with a swift grace that . . . can be exhilarating even as it teases the appetite for meaning,' while Douglas Houston has observed, in Poetry Review, 'The poems serve as parables, language of marked plainness serving as the medium for coherent narratives of disturbing emotional and intellectual import.'

'The fundamental gravitas of much of his verse is rendered unassuming by a pervasively casual, often blackly humorous, tone. Hughes's greatest asset is his uncompromising imagination; he refracts material from his Belfast background into remote fictions which distil essences of the Ulster nightmare.'