The best sensation novels are “novels with a secret”, or sometimes with several secrets, in which new narrative strategies are developed to tantalize the reader by withholding information rather than divulging it. The sensation novel reduces its action to mostly one event, or a few events that are inevitable, as is the case in The Scarlet Letter, in which the crime of adultery is combined with false identity and constant characters’ self-punishment, or the superfluous obsession with sin, as is the case in other two works: The Minister’s Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown. The Scarlet Letter has been interpreted as a story of sins and sinners. Through Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl, readers can see the sin of adultery and its consequences. Young Goodman Brown is a short story about good and evil. The protagonist is Goodman Brown who, for some reason, starts to think that everyone is evil. As a result, he becomes a distrustful and desperate young man who has lost his faith in other people that he has misjudged. The Minister’s Black Veil is a brief, highly typical, and thoroughly successful story, subtitled “A Parable”. An apparently blameless minister inexplicably dons a black veil and wears it forever, despite many well-meant pleas to cast it off. On his deathbed, he reveals its secret and justifies himself.