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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />Become a supporter of this podcast: <a href="https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss">https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support</a>.<br /><br />*To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books<br /><br />The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal<br /><br /> To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast<br /><br />Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk <br /><br />*Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback <br />