The man of God who cloaks his wickedness beneath a sheen of piety is a familiar figure in literature. Hypocrisy is the usual sin of such erring priests; Moliere’s Tartuffe is the indelible exemplar. Earlier authors, such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, liked to play the sins of the clergy off against the unassuming piety of their flocks (as when Chaucer writes bitingly of “shitting shepherds and clean sheep” in “The Canterbury Tales”), but their wayward clerics are seldom evil; their sins are grubby, an amalgam of lust and greed. In “The Power and the Glory,” Graham Greene updated this figure; still, his “whiskey priest” is guilty of cowardice, not outright wickedness, and this frailty, while despicable, makes him an understandable and convincing character. For the depiction of a truly satanic minister, however, we have to turn to the neglected but masterful novel “The Night of the Hunter,” which appeared in 1953, and was the first published work of the now largely forgotten American writer Davis Grubb.

Grubb was a prolific writer; he wrote often for the pulps but never lost his high literary ambitions. Ghost stories, science fiction, historical novels, and screenplays issued from his typewriter in a steady if unpredictable stream. Late in life – he died in 1980 at the age of 61 – he groused that his work had been undervalued and attributed this to the fact that because each of his books was wholly different in style and subject from its predecessors, critics didn’t know where to place him. I’ve tried to read some of his other books, such as the posthumously published “Ancient Lights” (1983), but frankly find them thin and dated. In “The Night of the Hunter,” by contrast, he produced a minor masterpiece.

The novel is currently available in paperback (266 pages; $13) as part of Prion Books’s “Film Ink” series. The film made from Grubb’s book, directed by Charles Laughton and released in 1954, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lilian Gish, with a script by James Agee, remains one of the most powerful and terrifying cinematic representations of good and evil ever produced. Sadly, it has overshadowed the book. With such a cast, and such collaborators, how could it have been otherwise?

With Jack Palance, James Cagney, and a very few others, Robert Mitchum was a leading man who could somehow communicate casual likeability coupled with awful menace by the sparest of gestures and expressions. As it turns out, Mitchum was far more than a star. He was a songwriter and a good pop singer and he wrote poetry and short stories – that is, when he wasn’t acting up or getting busted on drunk and disorderly charges. According to a recent biography by Lee Server, “Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care” (St. Martin’s, 608 pages, $17.95), which is an unexpectedly good read, he was quite an original in daily life as well. Certainly the marriage proposal he made to a girlfriend ranks as one of the most arresting come-ons I’ve ever heard: “Stick with me, kid,” he drawled, “and you’ll be farting through silk.”

In “The Night of the Hunter,” Mitchum created his most nightmarish character, the murderous itinerant preacher Harry Powell, who has bumped off six or 12 widows – he can’t quite remember how many – to get their money. Powell, known simply as “Preacher,” is evil incarnate. Preacher is a psychopath but one with a difference: He is driven by his vehement belief in a personal God. His evil draws its horrific strength precisely from his faith. The unshakable confidence of his faith is what makes him so scary. Neither Grubb in the novel nor Laughton in the film explains him away with glib categories. Though he certainly is both psychotic and a serial killer, his evil is systemic. He is the stalking embodiment of the Biblical verse: “The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. Who can know it?”

The film had captured my imagination so forcefully that I never bothered to read Grubb’s novel until a few years ago, and I was surprised by how very good it is. He evokes the sad, dwindling river towns of the Depression in bitterly lyrical prose until we can almost taste the hopeless air and feel how every night the dark comes down as a kind of squalid benediction. Best of all, by spinning the tale from the viewpoint of John and Pearl, the two young children whom Preacher hunts for the loot their executed father confided to their care, Grubb manages to accentuate the aura of evil that surrounds the pursuit. Preacher appears like the serpent in the Garden; if the Garden in those bleak times is a bit rundown and low on hope, so too is Satan, a shabby, threadbare figure with a tattered Bible.

Some critics have considered the novel melodramatic, and it is. But Grubb employs melodrama subtly and for his own purposes. In black homespun and with “love” tattooed on one hand and “hate” on the other, Preacher could have become a mere bogeyman. Instead, Grubb takes us inside his mind and shows us how money and a hatred of women and sex are roiled together with Calvinistic fury in his conscience.

He was tired. Sometimes he cried in his sleep he was so tired. It was the killing that made him tired. Sometimes he wondered if God really understood. Not that the Lord minded about the killings. Why, His Book was full of killings. But there were things God did hate – perfume-smelling things – lacy things – things with curly hair – whore things. Preacher would think of these and his hands at night would go crawling down under the blankets till the fingers named Love closed around the bone hasp of the knife and his soul rose up in flaming glorious fury. He was the dark angel with the sword of a Vengeful God.

The widow Cooper – “gaunt, plainspoken, and hard of arm” – is another character lifted from melodrama but she, too, is completely credible. Grubb portrays this country woman, who saves the children, without sentimentality. She is as rooted, frank, and generous – “a strong tree with many birds” – as Preacher is footloose, conniving, and mean. As Preacher tracks the children by night, he sings the hymn “Leaning! Leaning! Leaning on the everlasting arms!” and as he nears her house, Cooper joins in from afar; a duet of good and evil, love and hate, that is at once uncanny and puzzling.

Good may prevail, as it does in the novel, but it easily might not, Grubb intimates. For good needs evil in some inexplicable manner, just as the light requires the dark in order to be seen.