“The Man in the Black Suit” (1994)

I was excited to see a story by Stephen King in The Weird. I didn’t think editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer could leave him out but I guess I forgot about him by the time the chronologically ordered anthology got to Clive Barker in the ‘80s. This story is an interesting choice—a self-conscious reimagining by King of the kind of 19th-century American Puritan horror practiced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The story takes place in the deep woods of New England where a boy has gone fishing. He encounters the figure in the title, who is there to steal his soul or some such. It’s all pretty traditional business in many ways. Not much is particularly original but some of the details are good. The man’s eyes are described as red and orange, for example, windows into his burning soul. The story was published originally in the New Yorker, which speaks to the status of King’s career in 1994. He would win some kind of lifetime honor from some reputable literary group circa 2002 or 2003, which I always think of as the moment when he was accepted and embraced by the literary mainstream. With this story from the New Yorker he was on his way to that fuller, wider recognition. It does feel like King might be trying a little too hard here. He comes by his New England bona fides honestly enough—born and raised there—but he has never felt remotely part of Puritan traditions. Well, maybe remotely. But his style is all 20th-century contemporary and his horror is catholic, my feeble pun indicating his stuff is all over the place in terms of its sources. The woods and soul-stealing do as well for King as sacred Indian burial grounds, cosmic horror, vampires, werewolves, and/or zombies. And more. The guy is so prolific he almost couldn’t help having tried everything by the mid-‘90s. I used to find him insanely readable and wish now I’d read more of him then. Or maybe I reached my point of exhaustion after a few thousand pages (still only a fraction, I know). At any rate, I respect what I understand he’s doing here—getting the Puritan phobias about woods and the devil into the mix. Hey, that’s horror pure as much as anything else, up to and including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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