Books like Young Goodman Brown

Such a wonderfully (and eerily) subversive story of a man who sees what lies behind the virtuous facade. A classic "dark romance," it's got all the hallmarks of another kind of classic: that of the "hero cycle" (to use Joseph Campbell's famous phrase), where the hero has to leave society to gain wisdom, which he then brings back with him. Here, though, the "hero cycle" is completely inverted. The wisdom that Young Goodman Brown gains, when he's off in the woods, is the belief that the townsfolk he thought were virtuous are in fact hypocrites and deceivers in league with the devil. He can't even look at his wife in the same way afterwards. Was what he saw in the woods real or just a dream? It's never resolved, but it doesn't matter, because dreams and reality are one in this tale. The grim final sentence makes clear the depths to which he's shaken and the extent to which he was never the same again: "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."