In the old days, the fear of the Devil burned hot in our stories. Not anymore. Last year, as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards I read a ton of novels, novellas, and shorts, but didn’t come across a single true Faustian bargain story.
It made me wonder—has the Devil lost his sting? Do we have too many devils in our real world today to enjoy them lurking in our imagination? Or is the truth more uncomfortable—don’t we want to be reminded that we’re all making devil’s bargains in our everyday lives, all the time?
Being Dutch, I wasn’t raised with fire-and-brimstone visions of hell, but with a sense of practicality to the extreme. Whenever there was the threat of a flood, there’d always be a boy sticking his finger in the hole in the levee.
Writing horror novels (of which the Dutch have no tradition whatsoever), I love to bring that practicality to classic archetypes. Witch in your bathroom? Hang a towel over her face and go take your shower. Annual human sacrifice to guarantee your ongoing happiness? Pick someone who wants to die because our laws on euthanasia suck. What could go wrong?
It wasn’t so much Marlowe and Goethe who inspired me to write my own Faustian bargain novel Darker Days—it was the soul-selling we’re all partaking in in the pursuit of our happiness. We fly off to vacations knowing it wrecks the planet. We install air-conditioning to battle our self-made heat while polar bears cling to melting ice. We enjoy fast fashion, cheap food, and global convenience, knowing someone, somewhere, is paying the hidden cost.
The characters in Darker Days are us. For eleven months each year, the residents of a picture-perfect cul-de-sac in the Pacific Northwest enjoy their perfect lives: success, prosperity, health, exceptionally gifted children.
But each November, the Dark Days descend. Accidents strike. Illness spreads. Morality rots. The reason? Over a century ago, their ancestors made a Faustian bargain with an entity known as The Accountant. Each year, one human life must be forfeited in the woods to guarantee the blessings they enjoy.
Practical (Dutch) as I am, I figured people in such circumstances would still want to do “good”—like we all would. So who would they choose? Someone very old. Someone ready to go. But what if this year’s volunteer changes their mind at the last minute, and the fragile moral order collapses? I knew I had my book.
Faustian bargains don’t just make for good drama—they ask us to look at ourselves. What sacrifices do we quietly accept in our pursuit of happiness? Here are five remarkable works that deal with this question in powerful, different ways.
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Joe Hill, King Sorrow
I got a call from my film agent, who also happens to represent Joe Hill. He told me Darker Days and Joe’s upcoming novel had a remarkably similar premise: a group of people must offer an annual human sacrifice to keep an ancient evil at bay. Released in the same week, no less. A little stunned, we were quickly reassured that this was where all similarities ended.
Indeed, ours are two completely different novels. In King Sorrow, the bargain is made by a college student with an accidentally summoned, humongous dragon who speaks like Robert Shaw and who can tear planes in two. Don’t let this book’s 800+ pages scare you off. It is fast as a bullet; big, bold, and brutal—a darkly original fable that shows like all such stories that you get more than you bargained for…much more.
C.L. Polk, Even Though I Knew the End
This elegant noir-fantasy novella packs a Faustian punch. Set in a 1940s Chicago infused with magic and danger, it follows a supernatural detective named Helen, who knows she only has days to live — the result of a decade-old deal she made with the Devil. The story explores love, redemption, and sacrifice as Helen races to solve one last case and perhaps change her fate.
What makes Polk’s take compelling is the deeply personal scale of the bargain. The question is not just what you’d sell your soul for—but who you’d do it for, and what it means to try and rewrite a fate you’ve already accepted.
Stephen King, Needful Things
Stephen King has danced with the Devil more than once—most notably in his short story “The Man in the Black Suit,” which won the O. Henry Award—but Needful Things is his most classically Faustian novel. When mysterious shopkeeper Leland Gaunt opens “Needful Things” in Castle Rock, Maine, he offers residents whatever their heart desires—for a price. Not money, but a favor. Chaos quickly ensues as neighbors turn against one another in a spiral of violence and retribution.
Announced as “the last Castle Rock book” (it wasn’t, but the town does get a bad blow), this darkly humorous novel depicts the town as a microcosm for society, showing how easily people trade their morals for fleeting satisfaction. It resonates pretty well with the political situation in the U.S. today.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters)
Not a novel but a short story, and one that had a profound influence on Darker Days. This haunting parable is work of pure beauty. In the utopian city of Omelas, joy and perfection are built on a single, terrible truth: a child must be kept in perpetual misery in a dungeon for the rest to thrive. At age eighteen, the truth is shown to you and you have to make a choice: stay or walk away. Most stay.
Le Guin’s very short tale doesn’t include a devil in horns, but the deal is unmistakably Faustian. It asks: if the price of paradise is the suffering of one innocent being…would you still choose to live there? It continues to echo so well, because it forces us to look in the mirror. Because really…when push comes to shove, would you walk away?
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Let’s conclude with a classic we all know. Dorian Gray, a young man obsessed with beauty and youth, makes a wish: that his painted portrait ages in his place. As he indulges in every vice, the portrait becomes increasingly grotesque, bearing the consequences of his hidden sins.
Like in Le Guin’s tale, Wilde’s version of the Faustian deal is psychological. Again, there’s no demon signing contracts in blood—just desire, vanity, and moral decay. The price Dorian pays is his soul, yes, but it’s also his ability to love, to feel, to live meaningfully. And the conclusion is the same as in all these stories: we learn too late that what we gain never equals what we give up.
Like Darker Days, these works remind us that the Devil is not gone. He just changed shape. He’s no longer the King of Hell. He’s no longer even associated with religion. He’s the dark lens itself that points at all of us and asks: what compromises have we already made?
Because the truth is, many of us already said yes. We just didn’t read the fine print.
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