Is the Devil the "spirit of good"? Is he "the lesser brother of God" whom the Creator himself "seeks to complete"? Three disruptive stories by the great Fernando Pessoa.

The Devil and the story have attracted Pessoa since his childhood. His first recorded attempts in the short form date back to when he was 14 years old and, under a different name at the time, he published his first incomplete stories in magazines of his own inspiration. In his first English-language pseudonym, David Merrick - which remained just an empty name - Pessoa also attributes the intention to write a story entitled Devil's voice. However, the "Devil" appeared in Portuguese and, like all his stories, except for a few exceptions, it is signed with his real name.
In The Hour of the Devil, the first of the three stories in the book, a woman, Maria, on her way home, meets the fallen angel, who initiates her into the secrets of his world and her own and announces that she will give birth to a genius poet. In the second story, The Hermit of Black Mountain, crucial questions are posed about nature, the divine, earthly and after-death life. The third story features a strange man with "an indeterminate sailor-like and conscious adventurer's demeanor."

The Devil, the hermit, and the supposed sailor open, as noted by the translator of the great Portuguese writer Maria Papadima, "the door of mystery, knowledge, forbidden fruit" and "undeniably confirm Pessoa's attraction to the paradoxical, instructive, and disruptive."