Irving builds up an ominous sense of dread in the story, a mood reinforced by eerie locations and dark imagery, such as dank swamps, ghostly ruins, and all kinds of animals generally considered to be creepy, such as snakes, frogs, and alligators. This sense of dread and inevitability is strengthened by clear and repeated foreshadowing of Tom's fate. The narrator draws frequent comparisons to other figures, both real and fictional, who were punished for their greed. The untimely ends of Captain Kid and Deacon Peabody, for example, demonstrate that in the moral logic of this story, greed will invariably be punished.
There is therefore little suspense in the story, and the reader has no doubt that Tom will submit to his greedy nature, accept Old Scratch’s bargain, and in the end, be punished for his choice. Tom misses all of the obvious signs that he is falling into a dark spiritual trap as the story moves quickly towards its predictable conclusion. The swamp where he meets Old Scratch, for example, is an object of fear and foreboding for the people of Boston, a “lonely, melancholy place” thought by locals to be subject to a curse, but Tom is undaunted and soon finds himself in grave danger. The reader watches helplessly as he makes bad decision after bad decision, failing to learn from his experiences on his path towards an inevitable doom.
