The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith
The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast
Tony Walker
4.9 • 835 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Everybody dies, don't they? |
| 0:09.2 | Everybody come back, isn't that so? |
| 0:13.5 | You tried to get into the locked draw today, didn't you? |
| 0:17.7 | How do the dead comeback, mother? |
| 0:20.2 | What's the secret? The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith, narrated by Tony Walker. |
| 0:34.1 | The old Larkham House was a mansion of considerable size and dignity, set among oaks and cypresses on the hill behind Auburn's Chinatown, |
| 0:43.3 | in what had once been the aristocratic section of the village. |
| 0:47.3 | At the time of which I write, it had been unoccupied for several years, and had begun to present the signs of desolation and dilapidation |
| 0:55.5 | which untenanted houses so soon display. The place had a tragic history and was believed to be |
| 1:02.2 | haunted. I had never been able to procure any first-hand or precise accounts of the spectral |
| 1:07.9 | manifestations that were accredited to it, but certainly it possessed |
| 1:12.3 | all the necessary antecedents of a haunted house. The first owner, Judge Peter Larkham, |
| 1:18.7 | had been murdered beneath its roof back in the 70s by a maniacal Chinese cook. One of his |
| 1:24.7 | daughters had gone insane, and two other members of the family had died accidental |
| 1:29.3 | deaths. None of them had prospered. Their legend was one of sorrow and disaster. |
| 1:35.3 | Some later occupants who'd purchased the place from the one surviving son of Peter Larkham |
| 1:41.3 | had left under circumstances of inexplicable haste, after only a few months |
| 1:46.8 | moving permanently to San Francisco. They did not return, even for the briefest visit, |
| 1:52.1 | and, beyond paying their taxes, they gave no attention whatever to the place. Everyone had |
| 1:58.7 | grown to think of it as a sort of historic ruin when the announcement came |
| 2:03.6 | that it had been sold to Jean Evereaux of New Orleans. |
| 2:08.6 | My first meeting with Evereaux was strangely significant, for it revealed to me as years of acquaintance would not necessarily have done, the peculiar bias of his mind. |
... |
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