Someone is talking to you. Or is he talking to himself ? A deep, spacey voice with pondering pauses and a resinous Louisiana accent. “There’s this trick,” the voice says. “That’s the devil out there … That’s Satan, baby. That’s Lucifer, bruh. That’s Lucifer, that darkness sniffer.” Your whole life, it goes on; “you think, Oh, I’ll, I’ll just keep judging, keeping people at a distance … But then I get to the end of my life and I’ll realize, You know what? I didn’t win anything by doing that. That was a trick. And the only thing I won was being alone.”
Theo Von is not a preacher. Not officially. Officially, he’s a comedian with a podcast. But unofficially, he’ll take you right there, into that biblical light, into the hell chasm and the soul in its solitude and the benevolent rays of the divine. “The Lord lurks where the devil jerks,” Von says. And if he could get the devil onto his podcast—if he could land a two-hour download with Lucifer, that darkness sniffer, that snorter of lines of uncut night—he probably would.
This story is from the May 2024 edition of The Atlantic.
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This story is from the May 2024 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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