The earliest English settlers of New England feared a Black Man in the forests. Whether visualized as an Indian, an African, or a specter or Satan, this figure haunts the history and literature of the region. The Puritans brought the belief that the devil ruled the wilderness from the Old World into the forests of the new. Fear of this Black Man, symbolic or literal, can be found in Cotton Mather, whose witch cult's devil is Black; in Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), which recounts one such forest meeting; and in Stephen King's homage to Hawthorne, “The Man in the Black Suit” (1994). In the last-mentioned story, the devil encounters the 9-year-old narrator who escapes and, unlike Young Goodman Brown, does not lose his faith or the woman he loves (his mother). But at the end of his long life, he fears that the pale white man in the Black Suit whose eyes burn in his head will return: “And in the dark I sometimes hear that voice drop even lower, into ranges which are inhuman. Big fish! It whispers in tones of hushed greed, and all the truths of the moral world fall to ruin before its hunger” (67; emphasis in original).

Before the term “Gothic romance” was coined, the original English settlers imposed an apocalyptic and horrific worldview on the new land. Puritan divines created “taproot texts”: sermons, accounts of monstrous births and Satanic pacts, narratives of Indian captivity, and more that would inspire later writers of Gothic fiction, poetry, and drama. Though for many years “American Gothic” meant Grant Wood's painting, or the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, today's critics agree that it began in New England. As Vermont folklorist and novelist Joseph A. Citro states, “The New England Gothicists can be credited with formulating an American sense of the supernatural. They brought New England wonders to the whole world” (Passing 11). How does the American Gothic stand out from the novels of Britain's first Gothic Revival?