I absolutely love this short story, it does things to me as most of Poe's works seem to, to strike something exciting inside my mind. I think this is one of the better known of Poe's works, something like The Raven or The Pit and the Pendulum. Poe does a very good job of making you invested in the characters and the plot in a very short amount of time, as always, and gets your heart rising at the apex, which quickly falls to a satisfying insanity.
The man from whose perspective the story is told is obsessed with an old man, or rather, his eye. It haunts him, he needs it gone. He plots to kill the old man, and it's in this portion that the tension rises as he slowly prowls in on the man with a lamp. He kills the man and hides him beneath the floorboards just in time as the police come at the request of a neighbor who heard the old man cry out. The man is seemingly getting away with his crime, he is smug watching them standing unsuspectingly over the body; that is, until his conscience starts getting the better of him.


It drives him to hear the beating heart, like the sound of a watch beneath layers of cotton, through the floorboards. The policemen look unaware, though he's sure it's just a ploy, he knows they can hear it. The heart beats louder and louder, and he can't hear himself think over the incessant beating, which eventually leads him to confess everything in a screaming rage; the entire work holds a tone of insanity, bringing the feeling throughout so you can gain the tension more perfectly. Once again, a masterpiece from Sir Edgar.