The Devil and Tom Walker

Tom Walker is a miserly man in colonial New England who encounters the Devil at the site of a pirate's buried treasure, and accepts the bargain offered there in exchange for wealth. Washington Irving sets this tale of Faustian bargain in the specific texture of early American Puritan culture, where fear of the Devil was entirely sincere and the hypocrisy of public piety and private greed was entirely ordinary. The story ends with a judgment that feels simultaneously inevitable and just.

B.J. Harrison brings the story's colonial New England atmosphere to life with a storyteller's instinct for timing, understanding that Irving's dark comedy requires a kind of deadpan relish. His narration treats the supernatural elements as matter-of-fact, which is exactly right: in Irving's world, the Devil makes appearances as practical as a business transaction. At just over an hour, this is a model of the short-story audiobook, a complete experience in a single sitting.