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The Man in the Black Suit
"The Man in the Black Suit" is a horror short story by American writer Stephen King. It was originally published in the October 31, 1994 issue of The New Yorker magazine. In 1995, it won the World Fantasy Award and the O. Henry Award for Best Short Fiction. In 1997, it was published in the limited-edition collection Six Stories. In 2002, it was included in King's collection Everything's Eventual. King described the piece as an homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Young Goodman Brown". He also states that the story evolved from one his friend told him, in which the friend's grandfather had come face to face with Satan himself in the form of an ordinary man
25 pages, ebook
First published October 31, 1994
2 people are currently reading
77 people want to read
About the author
Stephen King
2,383 books890k followersStephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
September 12, 2024
Tiny boy meets the devil by a creek!
Not half bad. Feels almost nostalgic in its atmosphere.
Not half bad. Feels almost nostalgic in its atmosphere.
March 30, 2024
My first Stephen King story and first among the horror genre. I hoped that reading it in daylight would not scare me and hence picked it up to read in morning. But it looks like I was wrong!
December 30, 2025
i regret reading the censored line
February 26, 2024
This one was good, but I was left a little wanting. It's a good story if you want something short and spooky.
January 4, 2026
Randomly came across this specific short story mentioned in a recommendations post and I had never heard of it so I decided to take a gander... not bad!!! Very atmospheric and tense at the moments down by the creek 🎣. The poor boy!! Fun first read of the year.
December 25, 2024
Could’ve been scarier… but listening to creepy music did help. 1.75 ⭐
April 3, 2025
Read as part of the collection Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales.
February 24, 2024
Seeing he mostly writes novels, I was very curious about this short story. I loved it, don't get me wrong, but coming from him I expected...something else? Certainly not as "shocking" or "graphic" as his other works, but the tension is built up just as well and it still has the King's touch.
Very very good but sadly I have brainrot and like to see blood and gore everywhere. Anyways. If you like King, you'll like this one. If you've always wanted to read something of his but aren't a fan of his more graphic stuff, you'll like it too. Read it. LOL.
Obligatory bee joke. Bee happy.
Very very good but sadly I have brainrot and like to see blood and gore everywhere. Anyways. If you like King, you'll like this one. If you've always wanted to read something of his but aren't a fan of his more graphic stuff, you'll like it too. Read it. LOL.
Obligatory bee joke. Bee happy.
December 21, 2023
I read it as part of the short story collection "Everything's Eventual".
February 17, 2024
John Cullum narrator did a wonderful job. The book itself is good, but became very good with John's fantastic work
March 8, 2024
Could have been a bit longer for my taste, really liked the story and the way it was told.
November 6, 2025
Binge reviewing my best read Horror-Thriller short stories and novellas of all time
There is something chilling about the way Stephen King sneaks terror into the corners of the ordinary. “The Man in the Black Suit” is a short story that feels both folkloric and psychological, both a child’s nightmare and an old man’s haunting confession. This tale sees King stripping horror down to its bones — no haunted hotels, no telekinetic teenagers — just a boy, a forest, and a stranger who might be the Devil himself.
It begins deceptively softly: Gary, a nine-year-old boy, heads into the Maine woods to fish. The world around him is idyllic — sun-dappled leaves, a cold brook, that innocent, unsupervised American boyhood that feels like something out of ‘Stand by Me’. But then the air goes wrong. The smell of sulphur drifts in. A man in a black suit appears, with yellow eyes and shark-like teeth, and smiles too wide. What unfolds next isn’t just a confrontation between innocence and evil — it’s the death of wonder itself.
King has said Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown inspired this story” and the kinship shows. Both stories use the woods as a metaphor for moral confusion, temptation, and existential dread. However, where Hawthorne’s tale lives in the allegorical 17th-century imagination, King’s walks straight into the 20th-century American psyche.
Gary’s encounter feels grounded in postwar paranoia, the kind that seeped through the 1950s like invisible gas — faith eroding, fathers dying too soon, children discovering too much too young.
The story’s power lies in its structure. Gary as an old man, who remembers that day as clearly, as if it happened yesterday, tells it. Nevertheless, King never lets us be sure if the event was real or an hallucination born of grief — after all, the story begins with the boy mourning his dead brother. The ambiguity is exquisite: was the Devil truly there, or was he a projection of Gary’s terror, guilt, and dawning awareness of mortality? Either way, that moment in the forest defined his life. The adult Gary still dreams of those sharp teeth and sulphur eyes; he still feels the cold shadow behind him when he closes his eyes.
What’s extraordinary is how King achieves all this without the baroque excess of his longer works. There’s a restraint here — a literary precision that owes as much to Hemingway as to Poe. The horror is quiet, almost polite. The Devil’s dialogue is calm, amused, conversational. He tells Gary his mother has just died. He lies — or maybe he doesn’t. The terror is in the uncertainty, in the way language itself becomes an instrument of evil.
This story also taps into something deeply American: the myth of the lone boy in the wilderness, facing forces older than civilization. But unlike Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, Gary doesn’t emerge wiser or freer. He emerges scarred. The wilderness doesn’t educate him — it brands him. This inversion is quintessential King: he takes the iconography of Americana and turns it inside out to reveal the rot beneath.
If you strip it down, ‘The Man in the Black Suit’ is about the trauma of encountering death — not as a concept, but as a face. The man in the black suit isn’t just Satan; he’s mortality wearing a smile. He’s the moment childhood ends, the moment the world loses its glow. The woods become a graveyard of innocence, and Gary spends the rest of his life wandering its memory.
What impact did this have on me?
When I first read it, I was in that liminal age between youth and adulthood — just old enough to understand fear beyond monsters. King’s story didn’t scare me in the usual way; it ‘haunted’ me. It made me think of how certain memories — a smell, a colour, a sudden silence — can carry the weight of our entire childhood.
I started noticing the subtle ways the world shifts when something dies, whether it’s a person, a belief, or a sense of safety. The story’s real horror, I realized, is not in the Devil’s face but in the old man’s memory: that decades later, he still can’t tell himself it wasn’t real. That haunted me — the idea that fear can live longer than we do.
Why should you read this today?
Because it is one of those rare King stories where every word is haunted by restraint.
You will read it in twenty minutes, but it’ll echo for years. In an era obsessed with spectacle, this story reminds us that terror can whisper — that evil can smile — that the scariest stories are often the simplest ones. It’s a meditation on memory, mortality, and the quiet persistence of fear.
Read it not for the jump scares, but for the aftertaste — that lingering question: ‘Did it happen, or did I dream it?’ And maybe, like Gary, you’ll never really know.
There is something chilling about the way Stephen King sneaks terror into the corners of the ordinary. “The Man in the Black Suit” is a short story that feels both folkloric and psychological, both a child’s nightmare and an old man’s haunting confession. This tale sees King stripping horror down to its bones — no haunted hotels, no telekinetic teenagers — just a boy, a forest, and a stranger who might be the Devil himself.
It begins deceptively softly: Gary, a nine-year-old boy, heads into the Maine woods to fish. The world around him is idyllic — sun-dappled leaves, a cold brook, that innocent, unsupervised American boyhood that feels like something out of ‘Stand by Me’. But then the air goes wrong. The smell of sulphur drifts in. A man in a black suit appears, with yellow eyes and shark-like teeth, and smiles too wide. What unfolds next isn’t just a confrontation between innocence and evil — it’s the death of wonder itself.
King has said Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown inspired this story” and the kinship shows. Both stories use the woods as a metaphor for moral confusion, temptation, and existential dread. However, where Hawthorne’s tale lives in the allegorical 17th-century imagination, King’s walks straight into the 20th-century American psyche.
Gary’s encounter feels grounded in postwar paranoia, the kind that seeped through the 1950s like invisible gas — faith eroding, fathers dying too soon, children discovering too much too young.
The story’s power lies in its structure. Gary as an old man, who remembers that day as clearly, as if it happened yesterday, tells it. Nevertheless, King never lets us be sure if the event was real or an hallucination born of grief — after all, the story begins with the boy mourning his dead brother. The ambiguity is exquisite: was the Devil truly there, or was he a projection of Gary’s terror, guilt, and dawning awareness of mortality? Either way, that moment in the forest defined his life. The adult Gary still dreams of those sharp teeth and sulphur eyes; he still feels the cold shadow behind him when he closes his eyes.
What’s extraordinary is how King achieves all this without the baroque excess of his longer works. There’s a restraint here — a literary precision that owes as much to Hemingway as to Poe. The horror is quiet, almost polite. The Devil’s dialogue is calm, amused, conversational. He tells Gary his mother has just died. He lies — or maybe he doesn’t. The terror is in the uncertainty, in the way language itself becomes an instrument of evil.
This story also taps into something deeply American: the myth of the lone boy in the wilderness, facing forces older than civilization. But unlike Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, Gary doesn’t emerge wiser or freer. He emerges scarred. The wilderness doesn’t educate him — it brands him. This inversion is quintessential King: he takes the iconography of Americana and turns it inside out to reveal the rot beneath.
If you strip it down, ‘The Man in the Black Suit’ is about the trauma of encountering death — not as a concept, but as a face. The man in the black suit isn’t just Satan; he’s mortality wearing a smile. He’s the moment childhood ends, the moment the world loses its glow. The woods become a graveyard of innocence, and Gary spends the rest of his life wandering its memory.
What impact did this have on me?
When I first read it, I was in that liminal age between youth and adulthood — just old enough to understand fear beyond monsters. King’s story didn’t scare me in the usual way; it ‘haunted’ me. It made me think of how certain memories — a smell, a colour, a sudden silence — can carry the weight of our entire childhood.
I started noticing the subtle ways the world shifts when something dies, whether it’s a person, a belief, or a sense of safety. The story’s real horror, I realized, is not in the Devil’s face but in the old man’s memory: that decades later, he still can’t tell himself it wasn’t real. That haunted me — the idea that fear can live longer than we do.
Why should you read this today?
Because it is one of those rare King stories where every word is haunted by restraint.
You will read it in twenty minutes, but it’ll echo for years. In an era obsessed with spectacle, this story reminds us that terror can whisper — that evil can smile — that the scariest stories are often the simplest ones. It’s a meditation on memory, mortality, and the quiet persistence of fear.
Read it not for the jump scares, but for the aftertaste — that lingering question: ‘Did it happen, or did I dream it?’ And maybe, like Gary, you’ll never really know.
October 13, 2024
Very underrated short story from Stephen King about a little boy that encounters Satan in the woods in the form a normal man in a black suit.
The whole story is written like a classic eerie folktale, mimicking the vintage style of classic gothic ghost story writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Algernon Blackwood. It takes place in a remote location in 1914 Maine and chronicles the story of a normal everyday boy named Gary being absolutely terrified, taunted and psychologically attacked by the Devil himself who seems to be having an absolute blast scaring the living daylights out of him and forcing him to question the nature of his own reality. It's beautifully atmospheric, the family slice of life is oddly cozy, and the core of the plot is both disturbingly funny and unnervingly sinister.
As someone that has always been fascinated and comforted by the deep woods of nature in all their terrifying glory, this one just hit different for me. Really enjoyed it.
The whole story is written like a classic eerie folktale, mimicking the vintage style of classic gothic ghost story writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Algernon Blackwood. It takes place in a remote location in 1914 Maine and chronicles the story of a normal everyday boy named Gary being absolutely terrified, taunted and psychologically attacked by the Devil himself who seems to be having an absolute blast scaring the living daylights out of him and forcing him to question the nature of his own reality. It's beautifully atmospheric, the family slice of life is oddly cozy, and the core of the plot is both disturbingly funny and unnervingly sinister.
As someone that has always been fascinated and comforted by the deep woods of nature in all their terrifying glory, this one just hit different for me. Really enjoyed it.
November 25, 2024
📚 The Man in the Black Suit by Stephen King
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️.5 (2.5/5)
I decided to pick up one of Stephen's short stories because I miss reading so much! This is what I love about reading short fiction—where it takes you some place else for a while without compromising much time. However, The Man in the Black Suit fell flat for me. I have so many questions. Was the man really the Devil? Was it only in the MC's dream when he fell asleep in the woods? So many questions unanswered, but I guess that's why it's a short story for a reason.
The fear factor didn't hit me as much. There are scarier short stories by Stephen out there, but this story isn't one of them.
P.S. I still love you with all my heart, Mr. King. 🖤
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️.5 (2.5/5)
I decided to pick up one of Stephen's short stories because I miss reading so much! This is what I love about reading short fiction—where it takes you some place else for a while without compromising much time. However, The Man in the Black Suit fell flat for me. I have so many questions. Was the man really the Devil? Was it only in the MC's dream when he fell asleep in the woods? So many questions unanswered, but I guess that's why it's a short story for a reason.
The fear factor didn't hit me as much. There are scarier short stories by Stephen out there, but this story isn't one of them.
P.S. I still love you with all my heart, Mr. King. 🖤
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2025
i didn't really wanted to read it because It's a horror book, and I expect the same as always: death and graphic assassinations, almost gore.
But this was a lot more introspective than I thought it would be.
But this was a lot more introspective than I thought it would be.
August 27, 2024
Meh. Yes, Stephen King is a great story-teller as clearly visible in this one too, but this one for me was neither impressive nor scary.
September 8, 2024
2.5
me dormí en vivo
me dormí en vivo
June 19, 2025
If all of King's novels are like this short story, maybe I should be making his works a priority.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews