Same old story: a deal with the devil

I have to admit, the premise of today’s story, “The Demon in the Basket,” has been done before. Someone strikes a bargain with an agent of Hell and ends up feeling cheated? That goes back to 1592, when Christopher Marlowe staged Doctor Faustus — and Marlowe didn’t invent the idea, either. The legend of Faust predates the play by another whole century. This story has been done plenty. So why’d I bother?

Faust and the demon Mephistopheles. If you know who to credit for the art, drop a comment below.

The short answer is that it felt original. After all, Marlowe’s Faust starts as a bored adult, not a terrified six-year-old like my protagonist. And mine never becomes sophisticated like Dorian Gray (1890), nor is he defended (absurdly) by Daniel Webster, as Stephen Vincent Benet defended his (1936), nor is mine craven in the way of Ira Levin’s stage actor in Rosemary’s Baby (1967). And while the root of all “deal” stories, including mine, is covered in Bedazzled (Satan is a genie who grants your wish only to make you regret it), Bedazzled is, unlike today’s story, a comedy. “The Demon in the Basket” is horror. Well, spiced by a little comedy, as horror often is. But even if you remove the supernatural element (the demon) and leave just the basket, I think this remains a horror story.

In fact, maybe then it becomes more plainly horror. Maybe the demon is the comedy in what would otherwise be the straight tale of a particularly grim life. Does it seem to you that if Warren survived childhood without infernal help, he would have ended up a happy-go-lucky adult?

This movie comes in two flavors: slightly outdated 1967 and surprisingly much more outdated 2000.

So no, the proliferation of deal-with-a-devil stories did not ward me off writing mine. It encouraged me. This road is well-traveled because it goes to a lot of interesting places, and I think I found a turn that hasn’t been tried before.

The even simpler truth, though, is that no short stories are written (by me, anyway) in so calculating a frame of mind. They start with a vague idea, which turns into a first sentence, and from there, maybe I hold everything together until I type “the end.” Thoughts of Stephen Vincent Benet come only later, if at all. Such thoughts pertain to the decision whether to publish the story, not a decision whether or how to write it.

Or another way of putting this is, “The Demon in the Basket” just popped into my head. I know not where from. Do I owe anyone for it? Maybe. Maybe not. I only know that it arrived warm, and it felt right. So now I share it with you — in the idle hope that you’ll accept a deal, and spare the Cannibal Cyclops a Patreon dollar for it . . .