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.
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