Show Notes
There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil, not sin, not the ordinary darkness of human nature, but evil as a cosmic force, a radiation from a black sun somewhere in the depths of space. And he has come with a purpose. In the old Larcom house, with its history of sorrow and disaster, he has found exactly the conditions he needs.
His neighbour, a novelist, finds himself drawn into Averaud's orbit.
Clark Ashton Smith's *The Devotee of Evil* is a quiet story. It does not rush. It thinks. And what it thinks about has been troubling philosophers and theologians for two thousand years. *The Devotee of Evil* was first published in Smith's self-produced chapbook *The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies* in 1933, after failing to find a commercial publisher. It reappeared in *Stirring Science Stories* in February 1941.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a California poet, painter, sculptor and writer of weird fiction, one of the central figures of the *Weird Tales* circle alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with whom he maintained a long correspondence.
The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal
To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books
To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk
*Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback
*Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Classic Ghost Stories
Mr Bessel is a conscientious man, and the experiment he agrees to try with his friend Vincey is undertaken in the spirit of honest enquiry. It takes place on a quiet evening, and it concerns nothing more alarming than how far one mind might reach toward another. Yet something has noticed what they are doing, and before long Mr Bessel will have found that the self he has always taken for granted is far less secure than he supposed, and that some questions, once asked, are answered.
A middle‑aged businessman sits in a psychiatrist’s office with a problem he can barely put into words. Something in the world has shifted, or else something in his own perception has, and the solid faces around him no longer look quite as human as they once did. In his account there are no apparitions, no rattling chains, only the slow, unnerving sense that certain very ordinary people are quietly working to empty life of colour, choice, and meaning. As he talks, the calm, professional office itself begins to feel strangely less reassuring.
Edith Wharton's “All Souls” begins with an empty house on a winter night and a woman waiting as the snow piles up. Written six months before Wharton's death, this final completed work of fiction is something quieter than a cozy ghost story—and hard to shake.
Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!
An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something.