The Sorcerer's Apprentice

About this book

Frank Braun enters a remote Alpine community and discovers how easily people can be led towards dangerous convictions. His experiments in influence, desire and religious fervour spread through the village until private obsessions begin to assume the force of collective belief.

Hanns Heinz Ewers draws on the atmosphere of occultism and the psychology of crowds in this dark novel. Braun is intelligent, worldly and increasingly reckless, a figure whose fascination with human behaviour does little to restrain him. The story grows more troubling as the boundary between manipulation and sincere faith collapses. Mahlon Blaine's illustrations accompany the edition in Lumitheca's catalogue.