The Devil in a Forest is a short novel by American writer Gene Wolfe about the conflict between Christianity and an earlier pagan religion in Europe during the Middle Ages.

[1][2] The hero of the story, Mark, is an adolescent, an orphan, and the apprentice to a weaver very near a small holy Christian shrine.

During the course of the novel the village is occupied by both a brutal squad of the King's foresters, and a mob of the pagan charcoal burners who eke out a living in the forest.

[2] Wolfe explains, in an author's note, that the novel was inspired by a stanza of the traditional Christmas carol "Good King Wencelas".

[1] He describes the novel as an attempt to imagine what peasant life was like.