There are funny devils (“A Reversal of Fortune” by Holly Black, “The Power of Speech” by Natalie Babbitt, “Faustfeathers” by John Kessel), scary devils (“The Professor’s Teddy Bear” by Theodore Sturgeon, “The Price” by Neil Gaiman) and just plain weird devils (Kelly Link’s “Lull”, Jonathan Carroll’s “The Heidelberg Cylinder”, Richard Butner’s “Ash City Stomp”). There are classics here (“That Hell-Bound Train” by Robert Bloch, “Thus I Refute Beelzy” by John Collier, “The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson), and stories published within the last few years (“Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman, “The King of the Djinn” by David Ackert and Benjamin Rosenbaum). There are even a few deal-with-the-devil stories, though not as many as you might expect; I could have filled another book with the best of those easily, though.

There were a few narrative pairings I couldn’t resist, like putting Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit” next to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the story King says inspired the piece. And consider the scientifically-savvy title character of Mark Twain’s “Sold to Satan” as compared to the scientifically-thwarted villain of Elizabeth M. Glover’s “MetaPhysics.”

For the sake of variety I included a few edge cases-the Devil as seen through a glass darkly, say-like Michael Chabon’s dark oppositional deities in “The God of Dark Laughter”, the self-proclaimed Great Beast 666 (better known as Aleister Crowley, or “Alick” to his friends) in “Summon, Bind, Banish” by Nick Mamatas, and the mysterious furious unnatural force at work in China Miéville’s “Details”. It seemed appropriate-after all, the Devil appears in many guises, from long-suffering employee of God to prideful fallen angel to pure malevolent force of nature to suave collector of souls.

When I first conceived of the idea for this anthology, I knew I’d have no trouble filling the pages, because just about every writer of weird short fiction has taken a crack at the Devil at some point (even I have, though modesty forbade me including any of my stories here), and I had to leave out as many good stories as I put in.