Reading the Gothic Wilderness: Teaching "Young Goodman Brown" with Stephen King's "The Man in the Black Suit".

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) combines the ecoGothic horror of the forest with the internal turmoil of Young Goodman Brown's complex and contested perceptions. A range of short stories and novels have been inspired by Hawthorne's tale of Young Goodman Brown's ill-fated adventure, one of which is Stephen King's award-winning "The Man in the Black Suit" (first published in The New Yorker in 1994; collected in King's Everything's Eventual in 2002). This article provides an overview of how the author has used these stories in literature courses to introduce students to literary terminology, close reading, and analysis, as well as specific elements of Hawthorne and larger Gothic tradition. Reading these Hawthorne and King stories together highlights the lasting influence of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" on the contemporary Gothic tradition, as well as the way these tropes have been negotiated and reimagined through King's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]