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Selected Tales ... Edited with an introduction by
The Works of Edgar Allen Poe includes some of Poe's most famous works as well as some of his works as a contributor to other short stories along with other notable authors such as Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and many others.This Kindle edition also includes an Extensive Biography of Edgar Allan Poe with pictures of places in America where the author grew up, was educated, etc. Table of Biography of Edgar Allen Poe The Black CatThe Angel of the Odd--An ExtravaganzaThe Balloon-HoaxBereniceThe Business ManThe Cask of AmontilladoThe Conversation of Eiros And CharmionCriticismA Descent Into the MaelstromDiddlingThe Duc De L'OmletteAn EnigmaThe Facts In the Case of M. ValdemarThe Fall of the House of UsherFour Beasts In One--the Homo-CameleopardThe Gold-BugHans PhaallHop-Frog Or the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs How To Write A Blackwood ArticleThe Imp of the PerverseThe Island of the Fay Landor's CottageLionizing"Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq."The Man of the Crowd The Man That Was Used UpMarginaliaThe Masque of the Red Death Mellonta Tauta Mesmeric RevelationMetzengersteinMorellaMorning On the Wissahiccon Manuscript Found In A BottleThe Murders In the Rue MorgueThe Mystery of Marie RogetMystificationThe Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of NantucketNever Bet the Devil Your HeadThe Oblong BoxThe Oval PortraitThe Pit And the PendulumThe Power of WordsA PredicamentThe Premature BurialThe Purloined LetterA Parable A FableSome Words With A MummyThe SpectaclesThe SphinxThe System of Dr. Tarr And Prof. FetherTale of JerusalemA Tale of the Ragged MountainsThe Tell-Tale HeartThou Art the ManThe Thousand-And-Second Tale of ScheherazadeThree Sundays In A WeekKing PestVon Kempelen And His DiscoveryWhy the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand In A SlingWilliam Wilson X-Ing A ParagrabWorks as a THE BEST AMERICAN HUMOROUS SHORT STORIESFamous Modern Ghost StoriesTHE GREAT ENGLISH SHORT-STORY WRITERSModern American AuthorsLords of the Housetops Thirteen Cat TalesShort Stories
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First published January 1, 1832
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About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
11.2k books28.2k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 234 reviews
April 26, 2024
I am a big Stephen King fan and I know he is a big fan of Edgar Ellan Poe so I couldn’t wait to read this collection of short stories. Most of these stories were huge wins for me to name a few: MS. Found in a Bottle, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and A Decent into the Maelstrom. Some of the stories were so confusing and I didn’t really understand what I was reading I don’t know if that was just me or it was because of the writing style/age but I was lost sometimes.
Edgar really knew how to create fear and a feeling of helplessness! It’s crazy that some of these stories are only 10 pages long yet they have such a massive impact some of these stories will stay with me for such a long time. When he writes about water and the ocean it is truly horrifying for me – I read one of these stories on the beach on holiday and I thought I am never going near the water again. We have all kinds of stories in here but they all strike some kind of fear or feeling of despair or lunacy.
I am so glad I have read this book because it is really special – I don’t know if I would re-read the whole thing again but I would definitely pick out a story when I feel like being freaked out. I don’t know whether I have ever read such a frightening set of short stories. I would like to read more by this author. I need to read more classics although the writing can be hard to get my head around sometime oh my its worth it!
Edgar really knew how to create fear and a feeling of helplessness! It’s crazy that some of these stories are only 10 pages long yet they have such a massive impact some of these stories will stay with me for such a long time. When he writes about water and the ocean it is truly horrifying for me – I read one of these stories on the beach on holiday and I thought I am never going near the water again. We have all kinds of stories in here but they all strike some kind of fear or feeling of despair or lunacy.
I am so glad I have read this book because it is really special – I don’t know if I would re-read the whole thing again but I would definitely pick out a story when I feel like being freaked out. I don’t know whether I have ever read such a frightening set of short stories. I would like to read more by this author. I need to read more classics although the writing can be hard to get my head around sometime oh my its worth it!
August 4, 2018
Aunque no todos los relatos conservan esa frescura que se les supone en el momento de su publicación, Poe ha sido siempre un autor de referencia en mi biblioteca. Y de vez en cuando, repesco alguna de sus narraciones. No en vano fue una de mis primeras lecturas serias, cuando apenas contaba con unos 10 años. Eso te deja una huella permanente.
January 10, 2018
escalofriantes cuentos escritos en primera persona, me parece que tienen el mismo patrón de desenlace y que involucra en el clímax la locura, para hacer al lector preguntarse si lo que se relata es real, ficticio, artificio o imaginado por el narrador, en ocasiones se traslucen signos sugerentes de manía, depresivos tipo bipolar y ataques de pánico, no en balde se conoce ahora que Edgar Allan Poe sufría un trastorno afectivo
November 16, 2020
Salvo dos cuentos los demás no me han gustado. Quizás Poe no es para mí.
May 1, 2011
Oh, look, I can review this book from my computer. The ins and outs of this problem deeply, deeply confuse me...
Anyway, to actually review the book: the Penguin edition of selected tales of Edgar Allan Poe is an interesting one. His writing is interesting, reasonably absorbing most of the time, and it was quite good to read the forerunners of modern detective fiction in the form of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', though both of them got a little tiresome by the end because of the overload of detail. It read a lot like Sherlock Holmes... The more supernatural stories reminded me of William Hope Hodgson's work, particularly the ones about perils at sea.
Unfortunately, the themes get a little repetitive -- oh, look, someone's been buried alive again!
Anyway, to actually review the book: the Penguin edition of selected tales of Edgar Allan Poe is an interesting one. His writing is interesting, reasonably absorbing most of the time, and it was quite good to read the forerunners of modern detective fiction in the form of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', though both of them got a little tiresome by the end because of the overload of detail. It read a lot like Sherlock Holmes... The more supernatural stories reminded me of William Hope Hodgson's work, particularly the ones about perils at sea.
Unfortunately, the themes get a little repetitive -- oh, look, someone's been buried alive again!
May 14, 2016
أجواء غريبة وشخصيات غريبة وطريقة سرد أغرب ، بس اللي أنا فعلاً حاسة اني عايزة اتكلم فيه هو طريقة السرد؛ في جملة كدة علي لسان شخصية من الشخصيات بتقول لشخصية تانية " أعذرني علي الثرثرة غير المقصودة ، ولكني احتاج الكلام حتي تعرف ما يجول في نفسي " تبدو الجملة عادية للوهلة الاولي ، لكن طريقة سرد بو بتغير معني الجملة او أثرها بمعني أصح- مقارنة بالسياق ؛ الشخصيات فعلاً محتاجة الكلام ... ثرثرة كثيرة وقد تنتهي للاشئ .. في الحقيقة مش لاقية حاجة تُشبه هذه الطريقة من الكلام غير مشهد من فيلم لبيلا تار .. أحد الفلاسفة المغمورين كان بيثرثر في أمور فلسفيه لما اتحط العشا غير سياق حديثه تماماً وحوله للشوربة ! او المشهد الأكثر شُهرة لنفس المخرج بتاع رواد الحانة السكرانين اللي قعدوا يمثلوا كُسوف الشمس .. في الحقيقة في قصة شبيهة بده في المجموعة وهو رجل مديون ؛ اسكافي كان راجع من محل شغله واستند بالصدفة لمجموعة من الكتب في الفيزياء وجذبت انتباهه جداًلدرجة انه قرر انه يصنع منطاد ويسافر للقمر عشان يهرب من ديونه !
نوع من الكلام البائس كدة ، زي ما محاضر يدخل مثلاً لمجموعة من الطلبة ويبدأ يتكلم في الموضوع الذي يجيده اكتر من اي شئ كلام هاردكور وبعدين يحس بالبؤس لانه عارف ان مافيش احتماليه ان اللي قاعدين قدامه يفهموه يوم من الايام ..
الكلام دة فكرني اني قرأت من فتره ان لوحة بيلا تار المفضلة كانت دي:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsca...
في الحقيقة اللوحة جميلة ويُمكن ربطها برده بالمشهدين اللي ذكرتهم قبل كده ويُكن ربطها برده بطريقة سر بو المُميزة ؛ في اللوحة اكبر مساحة بياخدها فلاح ومحراثه ، وآخر صياد ومركب في الافق ومدينة تبدو مسالمة وايكاروس المسكين ما بيظهرش منه غير رجليه وهو بيحاول النجاة من الغرق ..
رجل حاول الطيران وصنع اجنحة من الشمع وابوه حذره من الاقتراب من الشمس ، ولكنه فعل وفي النهايه مجموعة من الاعمال اليوميه للفلاحين وللقرية هما اللي بحتلوا معظم اللوحة ..
هو نفس الأسي والله ..
نوع من الكلام البائس كدة ، زي ما محاضر يدخل مثلاً لمجموعة من الطلبة ويبدأ يتكلم في الموضوع الذي يجيده اكتر من اي شئ كلام هاردكور وبعدين يحس بالبؤس لانه عارف ان مافيش احتماليه ان اللي قاعدين قدامه يفهموه يوم من الايام ..
الكلام دة فكرني اني قرأت من فتره ان لوحة بيلا تار المفضلة كانت دي:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsca...
في الحقيقة اللوحة جميلة ويُمكن ربطها برده بالمشهدين اللي ذكرتهم قبل كده ويُكن ربطها برده بطريقة سر بو المُميزة ؛ في اللوحة اكبر مساحة بياخدها فلاح ومحراثه ، وآخر صياد ومركب في الافق ومدينة تبدو مسالمة وايكاروس المسكين ما بيظهرش منه غير رجليه وهو بيحاول النجاة من الغرق ..
رجل حاول الطيران وصنع اجنحة من الشمع وابوه حذره من الاقتراب من الشمس ، ولكنه فعل وفي النهايه مجموعة من الاعمال اليوميه للفلاحين وللقرية هما اللي بحتلوا معظم اللوحة ..
هو نفس الأسي والله ..
March 27, 2012
We’re supposed to love and revere Poe, we writers of scary tales, but I rather struggle to do it.
I had to read him again, just recently, because I was taking part in a discussion at the Danish crime fair, Krimimessen, in Horsens, on the subject of the macabre in crime fiction. Invariably, on such occasions, Poe will raise his ashen face. I dug out my old paperback copy and re-read a few of the tales: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat, the Masque of the Red Death, The Premature Burial, and by that stage, I’d had enough. I’d got the idea!
Poe, for me, combines what I don’t like about the short story, with what irritates me about tales of the supernatural, and with what absolutely drives me nuts about gratuitous horror or violence in fiction. Short stories can be shallow, and frustrating, tantalizing us with an idea or two, but ultimately lacking the word count to properly develop. Writers of the supernatural tale, whilst often having all the time in the world, frequently fail to tie up the loose ends, behaving instead as though they’re above explanations because the supernatural is at work. Those who pen gratuitous horror seem to think that if they employ our vomit reflex frequently enough, we won’t notice the writing is actually pretty poor.
I fully acknowledge Poe’s contribution to literature, but I think others, before and since, have told the spooky story better than he did. Other writers have taken elements of the paranormal and woven them, more subtly and cleverly, into fully-formed, three-dimensional tales. Poe’s stories are essentially two dimensional, incomplete yarns, liberally smeared with blood and gore to cover up the holes.
I had to read him again, just recently, because I was taking part in a discussion at the Danish crime fair, Krimimessen, in Horsens, on the subject of the macabre in crime fiction. Invariably, on such occasions, Poe will raise his ashen face. I dug out my old paperback copy and re-read a few of the tales: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat, the Masque of the Red Death, The Premature Burial, and by that stage, I’d had enough. I’d got the idea!
Poe, for me, combines what I don’t like about the short story, with what irritates me about tales of the supernatural, and with what absolutely drives me nuts about gratuitous horror or violence in fiction. Short stories can be shallow, and frustrating, tantalizing us with an idea or two, but ultimately lacking the word count to properly develop. Writers of the supernatural tale, whilst often having all the time in the world, frequently fail to tie up the loose ends, behaving instead as though they’re above explanations because the supernatural is at work. Those who pen gratuitous horror seem to think that if they employ our vomit reflex frequently enough, we won’t notice the writing is actually pretty poor.
I fully acknowledge Poe’s contribution to literature, but I think others, before and since, have told the spooky story better than he did. Other writers have taken elements of the paranormal and woven them, more subtly and cleverly, into fully-formed, three-dimensional tales. Poe’s stories are essentially two dimensional, incomplete yarns, liberally smeared with blood and gore to cover up the holes.
January 5, 2018
To inspire one frightful genre may be regarded as a misfortune; to inspire two looks like malevolence.
October 15, 2024
Me compré “Cuentos escogidos” en la libreria Lello de Oporto. Es un libro precioso por fuera y tiene una selección de buenos cuentos. Algunos son más complejos que otros pero en general se siguen bien y son cortos. Mis favoritos son “El pozo y el péndulo” y “Corazón delator”.
April 10, 2024
Poe's major tales are permanent favorites of mine from an early age. His imaginative power as a writer was immense and inimitable, and it is perhaps by virtue of his concentration and repetition of images that his tales work so powerfully. However, the narratives don't hold up as well because of the dubious devices he relies on so much (like the expository dump at the start of a tale, the character who is saved in the nick of time by observation and reasoning, the peculiar and fruitless material, such as the colorful rooms in "Masque of the Red Death").
The most fulfilling and effective of the lot is "Fall of the House of Usher," and the most innovative have to be "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."
This time reading Poe, I experimented with trying to read with "evenly suspended attention." In psychoanalysis, this is the essential capacity for the analyst to refrain from listening for or about anything particular in the analysand's thoughts but rather to freely move between multiple layers of meaning. I reckon that to read in this way is to suspend one's attention to theme, metaphor, style, history, and so on, and to maintain as much as possible a sort of unconscious receptivity to the way of being of the story.
The perspective this led me to was that the characters in any of the tales are not characters inhabiting a scene but are projected fragments of the narrator's psyche which through the action of the story dramatize inner, unconscious dynamics. Poe seems to have intended exactly this in the tales where narrators succumb to their own guilt and punishment as symbolized in other characters or objects ("Metzengerstein," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "William Wilson" for sure) and more indirectly in those tales where characters sadistically persecute parts of themselves as projected into another character ("Ligeia" and "The Cask of Amontillado").
Arthur Gordon Pym, I must say, I appreciate far more, ramshackle as it is throughout. Among its very many merits must be included all the things you would want to happen in a grim sea tale: cannibalism, claustrophobia, etc. Poe's best work, probably?
The most fulfilling and effective of the lot is "Fall of the House of Usher," and the most innovative have to be "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."
This time reading Poe, I experimented with trying to read with "evenly suspended attention." In psychoanalysis, this is the essential capacity for the analyst to refrain from listening for or about anything particular in the analysand's thoughts but rather to freely move between multiple layers of meaning. I reckon that to read in this way is to suspend one's attention to theme, metaphor, style, history, and so on, and to maintain as much as possible a sort of unconscious receptivity to the way of being of the story.
The perspective this led me to was that the characters in any of the tales are not characters inhabiting a scene but are projected fragments of the narrator's psyche which through the action of the story dramatize inner, unconscious dynamics. Poe seems to have intended exactly this in the tales where narrators succumb to their own guilt and punishment as symbolized in other characters or objects ("Metzengerstein," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "William Wilson" for sure) and more indirectly in those tales where characters sadistically persecute parts of themselves as projected into another character ("Ligeia" and "The Cask of Amontillado").
Arthur Gordon Pym, I must say, I appreciate far more, ramshackle as it is throughout. Among its very many merits must be included all the things you would want to happen in a grim sea tale: cannibalism, claustrophobia, etc. Poe's best work, probably?
March 4, 2020
Como 4 cuentos me gustaron, es muy triste porque tenía muchas expectativas, pero ninguno de los demás me generó nada; ni suspenso ni mucho menos terror y lo que menos me generó es ganas de seguir leyéndolo, hubo varios que dejé a media lectura por lo mismo, nada de interés en seguir leyendo. Me siento tan triste de que no me gustara que hasta siento que quizás no sea mi tipo de lectura, pero bueno, nada puede ser excelente.
De lo bueno que saqué fue los 4 cuentos, el gato negro en especial, amé ese cuento y por eso le doy 2 estrellas al libro, por el simple hecho de que esté ese cuento, también me gustó mucho "silencio", Alan Poe ocupa muy bella literatura en los cuentos que sí me gustaron y lo aprecié bastante del libro.
De lo bueno que saqué fue los 4 cuentos, el gato negro en especial, amé ese cuento y por eso le doy 2 estrellas al libro, por el simple hecho de que esté ese cuento, también me gustó mucho "silencio", Alan Poe ocupa muy bella literatura en los cuentos que sí me gustaron y lo aprecié bastante del libro.
June 6, 2016
not interesting at all! style is dense, always mysterious to that flow over events by narrating, narration in turn isn't tractable. Too classic, dumb characters, doesn't feel the easiness of mysterious tales, but too overworking to be accessed. The life of characters isn't spotted at the exact timing of dialogues. Didn't enjoy it!
August 15, 2023
In Edgar we trust 🙏
November 10, 2017
"Me ha gustado mucho volver a leer relatos de Edgnar, me ha recordado en mi época de instituto, las historias y los relatos me han encantado, aunque no todas han conseguido conquistarme, ya que muchas no me engancharon, siento que hay relatos mucho mejores de este autor, pero me ha encantado descubrir muchas de esas historias que no conocía. Un libro que recomendaría si sois amantes de Poe y de la época gótica, ya sea por la preciosa edición o por sus historias... os conquistará por completo. "
Reseña completa: https://obsesionporlalectura.blogspot...
Reseña completa: https://obsesionporlalectura.blogspot...
July 19, 2025
Pop Sugar Challenge #41 - najstarszy autor na tbr
Czytałam już wcześniej niektóre opowiadania Poe'go i niestety ale straszne jest to tłumaczenie Orbitowskiego - i nie mówię pod względem poprawności a względem zrozumienia - czyta się to topornie i miałam niekiedy problem i musiałam czytać po parę razy ( a znałam treść już niektórych opowiadań)
Czytałam już wcześniej niektóre opowiadania Poe'go i niestety ale straszne jest to tłumaczenie Orbitowskiego - i nie mówię pod względem poprawności a względem zrozumienia - czyta się to topornie i miałam niekiedy problem i musiałam czytać po parę razy ( a znałam treść już niektórych opowiadań)
November 17, 2023
Warto ją przeczytać choćby dla tłumaczenia Leśmiana.
August 2, 2012
It's hard to wrap your mind around in the 21st century, but in this one volume you can watch the drug and depression-addled mind of Edgar Allan Poe invent the horror story, the detective story, the genre of science fiction, and perhaps the cornerstone of English absurdist and manic fiction that blossomed out of the fresh corpse of post-war modernism. The real genesis of this could probably be attributed to Rabelais, whose obscene epic probably does much more than, say, the relatively terse Masque of the Red Death, but Poe brought that Renaissance setting to his audience in a light that the Renaissance author himself could not manage. Poe brought forth a sense of inevitable doom like no other, contrary to his blithely optimistic peers, Emerson going so far to deride him as "the jingle man", a light-hearted name from a guy who tried to dig up his dead wife to take her back in his house to a racist opium fiend who married his thirteen year-old cousin. Ah yes, those were the days. If Hawthorne is the light of that era, then Melville is its gray judge, and Poe its impenetrable shadow.
June 25, 2020
Este libro fue mi primera experiencia con el autor. Algunos cuentos me gustaron, otros me gustaron mucho más, y algunos otros, la gran mayoría, no me gustaron pero tampoco me disgustaron. Encuentro que es un autor diferente a lo que suelo leer y habla de temas que me interesan bastante, como la muerte en sí o por ejemplo uno de los cuentos que habla sobre enterrar a las personas cuando aún siguen vivas, y eso me atrapo bastante. Definitivamente quiero leer otros cuentos sobre el autor aunque mi experiencia no haya sido del todo positiva.
July 28, 2018
Definitivamente calificar con menos que 5 estrellas a los relatos de Poe, es la mayor falta de respeto a la literatura oscura. Creo que Poe viene claramente a marcar una diferencia, un antes y un después, en el horror mismo. La ultrainterna perturbación que genera el subyugarse a las palabras de Edgar, es un placer culposo por la pronta ausencia de sueño que deviene de la lectura misma.
Amense, y odiense.
Lean a Poe.
Amense, y odiense.
Lean a Poe.
January 2, 2020
It’s Poe, so you know the deal. As usual, the horror stories are the best. And credit to Poe for inventing the detective genre with Murders in The Rue Morgue, though the other two stories featuring detective Dupin – “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter” – come across like Poe trying to show off how intellectual he is.
December 3, 2017
Todos los detalles en la reseña hecha en mi blog: https://eligeunlibro.blogspot.cl/2017...
September 6, 2023
La manera en la que escribe es muy buena, algunas historias te atrapan, pero su final me bajabam la emoción. De los 14 cuentos me habrán gustado poco más de la mitad.
March 4, 2025
Dawno nie czytałam tak wymagającej językowo książki. Z początku, wydawała mi się nieco leniwa i niezrozumiała lecz po obeznaniu z językiem i stylem autora zakochałam się w niej. Z opowiadania na opowiadanie wniknąć można coraz to głębiej w przenikliwy, analityczny i mroczny umysł Poego.
August 5, 2025
3,5 Ha estado divertido, la verdad es que me han molado todos los relatos (mención especial a ‘El pozo y el péndulo’ que es de 5 estrellas). Me gustó especialmente que los malos fueran muy malos y no pidan perdón por sus fechorías, solo quieren regodearse contando sus miserias. Quizás estoy un poco en modo mordaz burlón de más, pero es que me ha hecho mucha gracia la desfachatez de todos los protagonistas de los relatos. Y tb el ahínco en los recovecos del alma humana, en ese llegar al fondo fondísimo de la maldad. Venga, vale, lo redondeo a 4 estrellitas :)
November 29, 2021
Una edición maravillosa digna de uno de mis autores favoritos.
La editorial hizo un trabajo espectacular en todo el diseño de este ejemplar, una manera única de presentar esos cuentos que tanto nos encantan a los fanáticos de lo gótico.
Quizás, en vez de Ligeia o las fábulas yo hubiese puesto La máscara de la muerte roja, pero eso solo es cuestión de gustos.
Hermoso.
La editorial hizo un trabajo espectacular en todo el diseño de este ejemplar, una manera única de presentar esos cuentos que tanto nos encantan a los fanáticos de lo gótico.
Quizás, en vez de Ligeia o las fábulas yo hubiese puesto La máscara de la muerte roja, pero eso solo es cuestión de gustos.
Hermoso.
May 14, 2024
I selected my own tales for this reading, as follows:
Metzengerstein
MS. Found in a Bottle
Ligeia
How to Write a Blackwood Article
William Wilson
The Fall of the House of Usher
A Descent into the Maelstrom
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Oval Portrait
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Masque of the Red Death
The Gold-Bug
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Black Cat
The Purloined Letter
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Cask of Amontillado
My thoughts on each are below, but long story short: one of the best writers I've ever read.
----
Metzengerstein (1832)
Poe's first published story. Metempsychosis, an ancient prophecy (that turns out wrong), a Latin epigraph by Martin Luther that reads: "Living I have been your plague, dying I shall be your death."
And indeed it's the story of two warring noblemen whose feud is continued when one is reincarnated as the horse of the other. Despite the Germanic romanticism the story felt slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Kipling, who'd said "My own personal debt to Poe is a heavy one," was supposedly inspired by this tale when writing The Phantom Rickshaw.
----
MS. Found in a Bottle (1833)
Awesome.
Imagine you're a weekly periodical named The Baltimore Saturday Visiter and you sponsor a short story contest and this very cool nightmare arrives in the mail. Poe won unanimously.
A polar horror story in the Coleridge line. The imagery has a vast sublimity: the ocean swells lifting the ship up to the level of the albatross, then plunging it back into the gulf, while a titanic black vessel appears teetering overhead. The story grows more and more Sturm und Drang:
"...I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin... All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe."
By the end the letter-writer is being sucked into the unknown at a terrific speed, his interest absorbed by the mysteries being revealed, though it means his death. It's like 2001:
"As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current—if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract...
"To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction."
----
Ligeia (1838)
Zombie story. The ghost of a man's beloved first wife murders the second so she can return in her body. I enjoyed how over-the-top this one is. When the narrator compares his wife's eyes to the feeling he gets when he looks at “one or two stars in heaven—(one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling," I began to suspect either he was mad, or I was reading a parody, or both.
The scenario at the end has a ghastly humor too, with the poor narrator seeing his wife die and come to life and die over and over again.
That conqueror worm poem is incorporated into the story, a perfect poem of its kind.
----
How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838)
Humor piece making fun of sensation fiction and the writing cliches typified by Blackwood's magazine. Some funny zingers.
Poe takes a not unjustified dig at De Quincey:
"Then we had the ‘Confessions of an Opium-eater’ — fine, very fine! — glorious imagination — deep philosophy — acute speculation — plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote the paper — but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper..."
----
William Wilson (1839)
Doppelgänger tale. The labyrinthine house that feels as big as the universe reminded me of Borges. The relationship between the doubles has a cosmic quality too, seeming, as the narrator says, to stretch to infinity. It's almost like the double is Wilson's good twin from a parallel universe.
Poe paints the relationship exceptionally well. It's unusual yet recognizable. I didn't know he had such conventional writing strengths in him. When he sent the story to Washington Irving hoping for a blurb he called it "his best effort." Irving told Poe it was "managed in a highly picturesque style, and the singular and mysterious interest is well sustained throughout.” This is true, although the mysteriousness resolves into a more moralistic tale that felt like a letdown after the outré buildup.
[Mem., see Irving's article "An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron," which Poe said inspired the story].
Hawthorne, incidentally, said "William Wilson" was very similar to his own "Howe's Masquerade," writing, "not only are the two general conceptions identical but there are various points of similarity." Poe, as was his wont, insinuated plagiarism. Hawthorne's was published a few years after, in the second volume of (the ironically titled) Twice-Told Tales, yet this was a reprint. In fact his came out more than a year before Poe's and it's much more likely the latter's accusation was just a "best defense is offense" tactic. At any rate it's a funny case of a literary doppelgänger.
----
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
The writing starts off amateurish but eventually becomes very technically impressive. The scholarly language has the same authenticity of M.R. James, and Poe details the Gothic setting with a realism that is quite masterful, such as this description of the vault in the house: “It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper."
(Poe was not a scholar yet his imitation is as convincing as his nautical one in the seafaring tales. He was astonishingly good at creating verisimilitude).
Stories like this, William Wilson, and many of the others differ in manner and matter from later speculative fiction such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the novels of Ira Levin yet are essentially of the same school of suspense--a school I'm now wondering if Poe invented, along with apparently everything else. It's the "weird things are happening" school, and you and the main character are tasked with piecing together the uncanny clues of, not so much a mystery, as a mysteriousness. That's what drives these tales. The search for meaning.
Here it is wrapped up in the house, in the twin sister, even in the look of "low cunning" and perplexity of the family doctor. The oddest stuff is when Poe goes off about the exterior of the house, with its zigzagging crack, and Usher's belief in the sentience of the edifice, connected somehow to the arrangement of the stones, the fungi covering it, and its duplication in the water of the tarn. The story also gives a glimpse of the fascination of growth and decomposition you sometimes see in modern horror.
Again the beginning is a bit overwritten, in the way Conrad can be. This was the other story Poe sent to Washington Irving. Irving, of course, put it better than me when he wrote back "You have been too anxious to present your pictures vividly to the eye, or too distrustful of your effect, and had laid on too much colouring. It is erring on the best side – the side of luxuriance. That tale might be improved by relieving the style from some of the epithets.” Valuable feedback from the master stylist, whom Poe valued above all for his style.
Marginalia:
*Apparently I'm not the first to theorize that the description of Roderick Usher is a description of Poe himself, as the Encyclopedia Britannica says readers were commenting on it back in 1839. Some took it to mean the resemblance went further than the mere physical, but I thought it was just an author's whim. Here it is: "A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten.”
Seriously, take a gander at the size of Poe's head.
*The unusual horror convention of a haunted house self-destructing at the end is found here. Apparently ETA Hoffmann started it.
Allusions:
*Weber's Last Waltz.
*The “glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.”
*This occult catalogue:
"Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and OEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic——the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.”
----
A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841)
Wow. A+
Reprisal of "MS. Found in a Bottle," except Poe edges you a little farther into the abyss. Less Sturm und Drang but you still get the very metal imagery, involving this maelstrom a mile wide, and a more conventionally intense and emotional treatment:
“All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. My brother was at the stern, holding on to a small empty water- cask... As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act—although I knew he was a madman when he did it."
The nature writing, with its historical and scientific sources, the expert action writing, and the attempts to describe the sublime all reminded me of Melville. Perhaps it was a deliberate reference to this story when Ahab says he'll chase Moby Dick wherever he goes, including "round the Norway Maelstrom," which was Poe's name for it. Ahab was a Poe fan.
The most sci-fi aspect of the story is when the boat is spinning around in the whirlpool at a 45 degree angle and the narrator finds he can walk on the deck as easily as if it were level. He doesn't say centrifugal force by name but he attributes it to the spinning.
The Wizard of Oz definitely stole from this when the narrator sees huge objects like trees and shipwrecks passing him in the vortex.
----
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said there was no one before Poe, and his word is good enough for me. I'm shocked at how completely formed the detective genre started. It's all here: a locked-room mystery; a preternaturally perceptive amateur detective and his sidekick; Dupin has friends on the force, which grants him access to the crime scene; he's slightly inhuman and finds enjoyment in the grim puzzle; yet he's humane enough to bear in mind the important things, here that a man has been wrongfully accused; he's coy about sharing his hunches, preferring to keep us in suspense; even the moment when he becomes the man of action, producing a couple pistols for him and the narrator, was just like Sherlock Holmes.
This is a long short story but a faster read than Poe's others because of all the dialogue. It's great, more satisfying than most mysteries. The gory particulars are genuinely horrifying, more so than any you'll find in the almost two hundred years of copycats. Dupin's discourses on his methods of deduction are actually smart. And the (spoiler) idea of the orangutan with its shaving razor imitating a barber as it committed the murders is inspired and somehow more nightmarish than if it had just gone on a rampage out of nowhere.
Marginalia:
*In a letter to a friend Poe addressed the reception of the story by downplaying the amount of ingenuity it took: "In the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself... have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?"
*The physician Dumas a possible reference to... Dumas?
*Poe was probably inspired by accounts of the real-life private detective (the first) Eugène François Vidocq, though Dupin calls him merely a good guesser.
----
The Oval Portrait (1842)
This very short story opens in high style, with a great and pointless frame story, where a wounded man and his valet bust into an abandoned chateaux in the Italian mountains.
It seemed to me an allegory privately addressed from Poe to his child bride, wasting away as he, the artist, attends to his art. Maybe he saw the irony of trying to capture her living spirit in his tales even if his neglect (perhaps financial) drew life from her body.
----
The Pit and the Pendulum (1842)
A white-knuckle survival story that disorients and blinds and had me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end.
Like one of Browning's dramatic monologues, the story transports you into the head of a character very different from yourself, with no exposition and only the person's thoughts to help ground you--except Poe ratchets things up by making the character almost delirious, throwing him into total darkness, and releasing extreme and outlandish threats upon his safety. And every time he wakes his conditions have changed to some new and novel atrocity. It's less a story and more a writing exercise in sustained terror.
The setting is a sort of alternate history of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars, which, again like Browning, is wonderfully fiendish and colorful, but really it's incidental. Poe could have made the recusant the victim of an alien abduction and it would've worked just as well. The point is the narrative experiment. Imagine Samuel Beckett's trilogy meets a snuff film.
Again, a seminal tale.
----
The Masque of the Red Death (1842)
In an unnamed kingdom the wealthy shut themselves up from--or rather lock out--a plague-ridden world. But of course you can't buy your way out of death. Yet another concept made popular in a million incarnations, but none with more simplicity and style. (Reading these in order of publication I think I can detect a slight taming of the prose, after Washington Irving's feedback).
----
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
Poe's genius in full ghastly bloom now.
“In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room..."
The story is obviously hilarious--for example when the narrator is so tickled by how quiet he's being that he chuckles to himself and wakes up the old man.
Things I picked up on this time:
Here again, as in Rue Morgue, Poe seems to (rightly) mock the importance of motive, going so far as to have the murderer assert "I loved the old man!"
The story can also be seen as laughing at the idea of considering premeditation to determine madness: “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening... Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this?"
----
The Gold-Bug (1843)
A delight. Once more Poe delivers where the writers that follow fail.
If the man didn't invent all these different genres, if he wasn't the first, he must've had one helluva knack for appearing to be the first. Now we're onto a buried-treasure tale, the inspiration for Treasure Island. The story was a huge hit second only to his The Raven.
It was a potboiler the starving author wrote to cash in on the craze for ciphers. He loved puzzles too and challenged the readers of the paper he worked for to stump him with their hardest ciphers.
In my review of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center..., I was trying to think who else had ever written like that, with its cool imagery and cryptographs. Now I know. Verne was a big Poe fan (he even wrote a continuation of Gordon Pym).
Poe is down-to-earth in this story, funny, and I was actually engrossed in the riddles. He is a remarkably lucid writer and his explanation of the cryptograph is made very plain.
----
The Black Cat (1843)
Less original rehashing of Tell-Tale Heart. There's even a curious echo between the eye that drives the narrator to murder in the one, and the cat's eye the narrator digs out in a fury in the other. The (spoiler) murder is rushed and I got the feeling Poe wrote this just to get to his ironic twist, with the cat being immured with the wife and its cries betraying him. Some perhaps ominous descriptions of alcoholism in this story.
But the psychology is quite good. Poe has a great understanding of the human heart and uses it here to penetrate that of a horrible brute, his feelings of anger, guilt, disgust, horror and, above all, perverseness:
“It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself——to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only..."
----
The Purloined Letter (1844)
Interesting even if you know the ending.
Mostly an intellectual affair. Takes place in one room. Dupin solves the mystery halfway through then gives us a lecture on how he did it. But the lecture is great--the best part actually. Poe makes some fun observations about human error, and illustrates his points with children's games involving marbles and maps. The way we, when stumped, only increase the intensity of our method, rather than altering the principle of it, is very true.
Poe also sticks up for the intellect of the poet compared to the math person:
“As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all...”
“You surprise me,” I said, “by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world... The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.”
"...The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude...
Though all the action takes place offstage, the ending is rather exciting when you hear about the switcheroo.
Marginalia:
*James Russell Lowell published this, just as he did The Tell-Tale Heart, in some short-lived journal. Poe told him he thought it was his best "ratiocination" tale.
----
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845)
Mesmerism. Gross-out horror. The story aims for a single creepy effect, and follows the improvisations of a nightmare. A neat and spooky idea, applying the novel technique of hypnotism to the process of death.
----
The Cask of Amontillado (1846)
Merely a scene, the scene of a crime, but very artistically and truly portrayed. A story of revenge set in Italy during the carnival, so probably inspired by Dumas. And now I'm certain Browning was influenced by Poe.
Metzengerstein
MS. Found in a Bottle
Ligeia
How to Write a Blackwood Article
William Wilson
The Fall of the House of Usher
A Descent into the Maelstrom
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Oval Portrait
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Masque of the Red Death
The Gold-Bug
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Black Cat
The Purloined Letter
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Cask of Amontillado
My thoughts on each are below, but long story short: one of the best writers I've ever read.
----
Metzengerstein (1832)
Poe's first published story. Metempsychosis, an ancient prophecy (that turns out wrong), a Latin epigraph by Martin Luther that reads: "Living I have been your plague, dying I shall be your death."
And indeed it's the story of two warring noblemen whose feud is continued when one is reincarnated as the horse of the other. Despite the Germanic romanticism the story felt slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Kipling, who'd said "My own personal debt to Poe is a heavy one," was supposedly inspired by this tale when writing The Phantom Rickshaw.
----
MS. Found in a Bottle (1833)
Awesome.
Imagine you're a weekly periodical named The Baltimore Saturday Visiter and you sponsor a short story contest and this very cool nightmare arrives in the mail. Poe won unanimously.
A polar horror story in the Coleridge line. The imagery has a vast sublimity: the ocean swells lifting the ship up to the level of the albatross, then plunging it back into the gulf, while a titanic black vessel appears teetering overhead. The story grows more and more Sturm und Drang:
"...I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin... All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe."
By the end the letter-writer is being sucked into the unknown at a terrific speed, his interest absorbed by the mysteries being revealed, though it means his death. It's like 2001:
"As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current—if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract...
"To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction."
----
Ligeia (1838)
Zombie story. The ghost of a man's beloved first wife murders the second so she can return in her body. I enjoyed how over-the-top this one is. When the narrator compares his wife's eyes to the feeling he gets when he looks at “one or two stars in heaven—(one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling," I began to suspect either he was mad, or I was reading a parody, or both.
The scenario at the end has a ghastly humor too, with the poor narrator seeing his wife die and come to life and die over and over again.
That conqueror worm poem is incorporated into the story, a perfect poem of its kind.
----
How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838)
Humor piece making fun of sensation fiction and the writing cliches typified by Blackwood's magazine. Some funny zingers.
Poe takes a not unjustified dig at De Quincey:
"Then we had the ‘Confessions of an Opium-eater’ — fine, very fine! — glorious imagination — deep philosophy — acute speculation — plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote the paper — but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper..."
----
William Wilson (1839)
Doppelgänger tale. The labyrinthine house that feels as big as the universe reminded me of Borges. The relationship between the doubles has a cosmic quality too, seeming, as the narrator says, to stretch to infinity. It's almost like the double is Wilson's good twin from a parallel universe.
Poe paints the relationship exceptionally well. It's unusual yet recognizable. I didn't know he had such conventional writing strengths in him. When he sent the story to Washington Irving hoping for a blurb he called it "his best effort." Irving told Poe it was "managed in a highly picturesque style, and the singular and mysterious interest is well sustained throughout.” This is true, although the mysteriousness resolves into a more moralistic tale that felt like a letdown after the outré buildup.
[Mem., see Irving's article "An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron," which Poe said inspired the story].
Hawthorne, incidentally, said "William Wilson" was very similar to his own "Howe's Masquerade," writing, "not only are the two general conceptions identical but there are various points of similarity." Poe, as was his wont, insinuated plagiarism. Hawthorne's was published a few years after, in the second volume of (the ironically titled) Twice-Told Tales, yet this was a reprint. In fact his came out more than a year before Poe's and it's much more likely the latter's accusation was just a "best defense is offense" tactic. At any rate it's a funny case of a literary doppelgänger.
----
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
The writing starts off amateurish but eventually becomes very technically impressive. The scholarly language has the same authenticity of M.R. James, and Poe details the Gothic setting with a realism that is quite masterful, such as this description of the vault in the house: “It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper."
(Poe was not a scholar yet his imitation is as convincing as his nautical one in the seafaring tales. He was astonishingly good at creating verisimilitude).
Stories like this, William Wilson, and many of the others differ in manner and matter from later speculative fiction such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the novels of Ira Levin yet are essentially of the same school of suspense--a school I'm now wondering if Poe invented, along with apparently everything else. It's the "weird things are happening" school, and you and the main character are tasked with piecing together the uncanny clues of, not so much a mystery, as a mysteriousness. That's what drives these tales. The search for meaning.
Here it is wrapped up in the house, in the twin sister, even in the look of "low cunning" and perplexity of the family doctor. The oddest stuff is when Poe goes off about the exterior of the house, with its zigzagging crack, and Usher's belief in the sentience of the edifice, connected somehow to the arrangement of the stones, the fungi covering it, and its duplication in the water of the tarn. The story also gives a glimpse of the fascination of growth and decomposition you sometimes see in modern horror.
Again the beginning is a bit overwritten, in the way Conrad can be. This was the other story Poe sent to Washington Irving. Irving, of course, put it better than me when he wrote back "You have been too anxious to present your pictures vividly to the eye, or too distrustful of your effect, and had laid on too much colouring. It is erring on the best side – the side of luxuriance. That tale might be improved by relieving the style from some of the epithets.” Valuable feedback from the master stylist, whom Poe valued above all for his style.
Marginalia:
*Apparently I'm not the first to theorize that the description of Roderick Usher is a description of Poe himself, as the Encyclopedia Britannica says readers were commenting on it back in 1839. Some took it to mean the resemblance went further than the mere physical, but I thought it was just an author's whim. Here it is: "A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten.”
Seriously, take a gander at the size of Poe's head.
*The unusual horror convention of a haunted house self-destructing at the end is found here. Apparently ETA Hoffmann started it.
Allusions:
*Weber's Last Waltz.
*The “glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.”
*This occult catalogue:
"Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and OEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic——the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.”
----
A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841)
Wow. A+
Reprisal of "MS. Found in a Bottle," except Poe edges you a little farther into the abyss. Less Sturm und Drang but you still get the very metal imagery, involving this maelstrom a mile wide, and a more conventionally intense and emotional treatment:
“All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. My brother was at the stern, holding on to a small empty water- cask... As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act—although I knew he was a madman when he did it."
The nature writing, with its historical and scientific sources, the expert action writing, and the attempts to describe the sublime all reminded me of Melville. Perhaps it was a deliberate reference to this story when Ahab says he'll chase Moby Dick wherever he goes, including "round the Norway Maelstrom," which was Poe's name for it. Ahab was a Poe fan.
The most sci-fi aspect of the story is when the boat is spinning around in the whirlpool at a 45 degree angle and the narrator finds he can walk on the deck as easily as if it were level. He doesn't say centrifugal force by name but he attributes it to the spinning.
The Wizard of Oz definitely stole from this when the narrator sees huge objects like trees and shipwrecks passing him in the vortex.
----
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said there was no one before Poe, and his word is good enough for me. I'm shocked at how completely formed the detective genre started. It's all here: a locked-room mystery; a preternaturally perceptive amateur detective and his sidekick; Dupin has friends on the force, which grants him access to the crime scene; he's slightly inhuman and finds enjoyment in the grim puzzle; yet he's humane enough to bear in mind the important things, here that a man has been wrongfully accused; he's coy about sharing his hunches, preferring to keep us in suspense; even the moment when he becomes the man of action, producing a couple pistols for him and the narrator, was just like Sherlock Holmes.
This is a long short story but a faster read than Poe's others because of all the dialogue. It's great, more satisfying than most mysteries. The gory particulars are genuinely horrifying, more so than any you'll find in the almost two hundred years of copycats. Dupin's discourses on his methods of deduction are actually smart. And the (spoiler) idea of the orangutan with its shaving razor imitating a barber as it committed the murders is inspired and somehow more nightmarish than if it had just gone on a rampage out of nowhere.
Marginalia:
*In a letter to a friend Poe addressed the reception of the story by downplaying the amount of ingenuity it took: "In the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself... have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?"
*The physician Dumas a possible reference to... Dumas?
*Poe was probably inspired by accounts of the real-life private detective (the first) Eugène François Vidocq, though Dupin calls him merely a good guesser.
----
The Oval Portrait (1842)
This very short story opens in high style, with a great and pointless frame story, where a wounded man and his valet bust into an abandoned chateaux in the Italian mountains.
It seemed to me an allegory privately addressed from Poe to his child bride, wasting away as he, the artist, attends to his art. Maybe he saw the irony of trying to capture her living spirit in his tales even if his neglect (perhaps financial) drew life from her body.
----
The Pit and the Pendulum (1842)
A white-knuckle survival story that disorients and blinds and had me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end.
Like one of Browning's dramatic monologues, the story transports you into the head of a character very different from yourself, with no exposition and only the person's thoughts to help ground you--except Poe ratchets things up by making the character almost delirious, throwing him into total darkness, and releasing extreme and outlandish threats upon his safety. And every time he wakes his conditions have changed to some new and novel atrocity. It's less a story and more a writing exercise in sustained terror.
The setting is a sort of alternate history of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars, which, again like Browning, is wonderfully fiendish and colorful, but really it's incidental. Poe could have made the recusant the victim of an alien abduction and it would've worked just as well. The point is the narrative experiment. Imagine Samuel Beckett's trilogy meets a snuff film.
Again, a seminal tale.
----
The Masque of the Red Death (1842)
In an unnamed kingdom the wealthy shut themselves up from--or rather lock out--a plague-ridden world. But of course you can't buy your way out of death. Yet another concept made popular in a million incarnations, but none with more simplicity and style. (Reading these in order of publication I think I can detect a slight taming of the prose, after Washington Irving's feedback).
----
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
Poe's genius in full ghastly bloom now.
“In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room..."
The story is obviously hilarious--for example when the narrator is so tickled by how quiet he's being that he chuckles to himself and wakes up the old man.
Things I picked up on this time:
Here again, as in Rue Morgue, Poe seems to (rightly) mock the importance of motive, going so far as to have the murderer assert "I loved the old man!"
The story can also be seen as laughing at the idea of considering premeditation to determine madness: “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening... Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this?"
----
The Gold-Bug (1843)
A delight. Once more Poe delivers where the writers that follow fail.
If the man didn't invent all these different genres, if he wasn't the first, he must've had one helluva knack for appearing to be the first. Now we're onto a buried-treasure tale, the inspiration for Treasure Island. The story was a huge hit second only to his The Raven.
It was a potboiler the starving author wrote to cash in on the craze for ciphers. He loved puzzles too and challenged the readers of the paper he worked for to stump him with their hardest ciphers.
In my review of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center..., I was trying to think who else had ever written like that, with its cool imagery and cryptographs. Now I know. Verne was a big Poe fan (he even wrote a continuation of Gordon Pym).
Poe is down-to-earth in this story, funny, and I was actually engrossed in the riddles. He is a remarkably lucid writer and his explanation of the cryptograph is made very plain.
----
The Black Cat (1843)
Less original rehashing of Tell-Tale Heart. There's even a curious echo between the eye that drives the narrator to murder in the one, and the cat's eye the narrator digs out in a fury in the other. The (spoiler) murder is rushed and I got the feeling Poe wrote this just to get to his ironic twist, with the cat being immured with the wife and its cries betraying him. Some perhaps ominous descriptions of alcoholism in this story.
But the psychology is quite good. Poe has a great understanding of the human heart and uses it here to penetrate that of a horrible brute, his feelings of anger, guilt, disgust, horror and, above all, perverseness:
“It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself——to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only..."
----
The Purloined Letter (1844)
Interesting even if you know the ending.
Mostly an intellectual affair. Takes place in one room. Dupin solves the mystery halfway through then gives us a lecture on how he did it. But the lecture is great--the best part actually. Poe makes some fun observations about human error, and illustrates his points with children's games involving marbles and maps. The way we, when stumped, only increase the intensity of our method, rather than altering the principle of it, is very true.
Poe also sticks up for the intellect of the poet compared to the math person:
“As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all...”
“You surprise me,” I said, “by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world... The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.”
"...The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude...
Though all the action takes place offstage, the ending is rather exciting when you hear about the switcheroo.
Marginalia:
*James Russell Lowell published this, just as he did The Tell-Tale Heart, in some short-lived journal. Poe told him he thought it was his best "ratiocination" tale.
----
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845)
Mesmerism. Gross-out horror. The story aims for a single creepy effect, and follows the improvisations of a nightmare. A neat and spooky idea, applying the novel technique of hypnotism to the process of death.
----
The Cask of Amontillado (1846)
Merely a scene, the scene of a crime, but very artistically and truly portrayed. A story of revenge set in Italy during the carnival, so probably inspired by Dumas. And now I'm certain Browning was influenced by Poe.
June 25, 2015
"I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity."
I bought this book more than four years ago, but it is only a few days ago that I decided to read it completely. Sure, I've read some of the stories, but only about five or so. I have always loved The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart, the latter I read for at least five times. I will first present my individual ratings of the stories (the rating three stars for the book would be the average):
The Duc De L'Omelette ★☆☆☆☆
MS. Found in a Bottle ★★☆☆☆
The Assignation ★★★☆☆
Ligeia ★★★★☆
How to Write a Blackwood Article ★★★☆☆
The Fall of the House of Usher ★★★★☆
William Wilson ★★★★★
The Murders in the Rue Morgue ★★★★★
A Descent into the Maelstrom ★☆☆☆☆
The Island of the Fay ★☆☆☆☆
The Colloquy of Monos and Una ★★☆☆☆
The Oval Portrait ★★★★★
The Masque of the Red Death ★★★☆☆
The Mystery of Marie Roget ★★☆☆☆
The Pit and the Pendulum ★★★★☆
The Tell-Tale Heart ★★★★★
The Gold-Bug ★★★☆☆
The Black Cat ★★★★★
The Premature Burial ★★★★☆
The Purloined Letter ★★★★★
The Imp of the Perverse ★★☆☆☆
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar ★★★★☆
The Cask of Amontillado ★★★★☆
The Domain of Arnheim ★☆☆☆☆
Von Kempelen and His Discovery ★★★☆☆
I really like the way Poe wrote - it was almost like poetry, especially the way he manipulated the words and juxtaposed them. His style was very lyrical and personal, and as a reader, I felt really drawn to the minds of the characters, as though I could see the workings of their minds through the writing. In a way, it was also reminiscent of the "stream-of-consciousness" style. That being said, I preferred it when he wrote in the first-person, so much so that in Ligeia, although it was primarily narration, I wasn't bored. His protagonists' voice were distinct as well.
He had this annoying habit though of lapsing into rantings and ramblings, as was seen in A Descent into the Maelstrom, The Island of the Fay, and The Imp of the Perverse. Furthermore, I struggled in some of the stories (including the three mentioned) because I was confused the entire time. It was greatly exemplified in The Duc De L'Omelette. I didn't know which was which, and who was talking to who. In my opinion, it was a terrible decision to place it at the very beginning.
I like Poe best as a horror writer, then detective, and least would be as a science-fiction writer. The MS. in a Bottle wasn't really that bad, but as a piece of science-fiction, it didn't stand out. However, The Murders in the Rue Morgue was absolutely amazing. His fictional detective, Dupin, was a genius and was quite memorable.
Need I say more about him as a horror writer? I found Ligeia to be predictable, but still, the amount of terror in the story still managed to make my hair rise at the end, especially because of the last sentence. As I've mentioned, I've read The Tell-Tale Heart numerous times before, and whenever I did, it always chilled me to the bone. The narrator's voice was so memorable, and it gave an accurate picture of the protagonist's character. He claimed that he wasn't a madman, but through the writing, every inch portrayed his insanity. The tone was darkly sarcastic, another indication of his madness. I admire Poe's usage of clear and specific imagery to draw in the readers to the scene.
I wouldn't say that reading Poe is an enjoyable experience. It isn't. His stories are disturbing, haunting, and frightening. It makes you wonder about how the human minds work, and how the author could capture the madness of his protagonists so accurately if he weren't mad himself. Read at least The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart - if those aren't enough to make your hair rise in terror, I don't know what would.
I bought this book more than four years ago, but it is only a few days ago that I decided to read it completely. Sure, I've read some of the stories, but only about five or so. I have always loved The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart, the latter I read for at least five times. I will first present my individual ratings of the stories (the rating three stars for the book would be the average):
The Duc De L'Omelette ★☆☆☆☆
MS. Found in a Bottle ★★☆☆☆
The Assignation ★★★☆☆
Ligeia ★★★★☆
How to Write a Blackwood Article ★★★☆☆
The Fall of the House of Usher ★★★★☆
William Wilson ★★★★★
The Murders in the Rue Morgue ★★★★★
A Descent into the Maelstrom ★☆☆☆☆
The Island of the Fay ★☆☆☆☆
The Colloquy of Monos and Una ★★☆☆☆
The Oval Portrait ★★★★★
The Masque of the Red Death ★★★☆☆
The Mystery of Marie Roget ★★☆☆☆
The Pit and the Pendulum ★★★★☆
The Tell-Tale Heart ★★★★★
The Gold-Bug ★★★☆☆
The Black Cat ★★★★★
The Premature Burial ★★★★☆
The Purloined Letter ★★★★★
The Imp of the Perverse ★★☆☆☆
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar ★★★★☆
The Cask of Amontillado ★★★★☆
The Domain of Arnheim ★☆☆☆☆
Von Kempelen and His Discovery ★★★☆☆
I really like the way Poe wrote - it was almost like poetry, especially the way he manipulated the words and juxtaposed them. His style was very lyrical and personal, and as a reader, I felt really drawn to the minds of the characters, as though I could see the workings of their minds through the writing. In a way, it was also reminiscent of the "stream-of-consciousness" style. That being said, I preferred it when he wrote in the first-person, so much so that in Ligeia, although it was primarily narration, I wasn't bored. His protagonists' voice were distinct as well.
He had this annoying habit though of lapsing into rantings and ramblings, as was seen in A Descent into the Maelstrom, The Island of the Fay, and The Imp of the Perverse. Furthermore, I struggled in some of the stories (including the three mentioned) because I was confused the entire time. It was greatly exemplified in The Duc De L'Omelette. I didn't know which was which, and who was talking to who. In my opinion, it was a terrible decision to place it at the very beginning.
I like Poe best as a horror writer, then detective, and least would be as a science-fiction writer. The MS. in a Bottle wasn't really that bad, but as a piece of science-fiction, it didn't stand out. However, The Murders in the Rue Morgue was absolutely amazing. His fictional detective, Dupin, was a genius and was quite memorable.
Need I say more about him as a horror writer? I found Ligeia to be predictable, but still, the amount of terror in the story still managed to make my hair rise at the end, especially because of the last sentence. As I've mentioned, I've read The Tell-Tale Heart numerous times before, and whenever I did, it always chilled me to the bone. The narrator's voice was so memorable, and it gave an accurate picture of the protagonist's character. He claimed that he wasn't a madman, but through the writing, every inch portrayed his insanity. The tone was darkly sarcastic, another indication of his madness. I admire Poe's usage of clear and specific imagery to draw in the readers to the scene.
I wouldn't say that reading Poe is an enjoyable experience. It isn't. His stories are disturbing, haunting, and frightening. It makes you wonder about how the human minds work, and how the author could capture the madness of his protagonists so accurately if he weren't mad himself. Read at least The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart - if those aren't enough to make your hair rise in terror, I don't know what would.
February 9, 2017
This took me a long while to finish it, but despite that I have really enjoyed it.
This wasn't my first time reading Poe, but it was the first time I read so many tales penned by him in the same book. Although this is my second time reading him in English, before I had only read shortened versions for students, so I'm glad I could experience the whole extent not only of his work, but also of his style.
Of course, I have liked some stories more than others:
-The Assignation had an air of mystery and elegance which I really enjoyed (the fact that it was set in Italy helped :P).
-Ligeia was simply breathtakingly beautiful. Short, but so intense.
-How to Write a Blackwood Article surprised me with its humouristic and almost absurd tone. I certainly wasn't expecting that from Poe, but I think he made it work very well, as it really amused me.
-William Wilson was another surprise, as I had never heard about this story and it was very interesting. Döpelgangers are such a rewarding subject, and a very gothic one at that!
-The Murders in the Rue Morgue was one of Poe's stories I already knew. However, his entire length was too extense for me, and Dupin's analysing method too theoretical for my tastes, as I am more used to other detective schemes (ie. Sherlock Holmes). Nevertheless, I prefer this one to the rest of Dupin's stories, which frankly bored me.
-A Descent into the Maelström has such a powerful and stunning description of the scenery, which really made me enjoy this story a lot, thanks to its visual imagery.
-The Masque of the Red Death was another Poe's tale I had already read in English. Curiously, I enjoyed more that shortened version rather than this, maybe because the writing style here overwhelmed me.
-The Pit and the Pendulum is just MARVELOUS. I enjoyed this way more now, and Poe will never cease to amaze me with the ominous sense of fatality and death that you can feel here.
-The same goes for The Tell-Tale Heart. This is such a page-turner, it's totally gripping. It makes you *feel* the insanity of the narrator and, the more he talks, the more you know how twisted his mind is. Simply insanely brilliant and certainly my favourite!
-The Gold Bug: I had heard a lot about this story and I'm pleased to say I liked it a lot. Although the ending wasn't as spectacular as I had anticipated at the start, it also made me want to read faster to know what was going on.
-The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar was quite a surprise. Their themes aren't exactly new to Poe, but I liked the notion of mesmerisation and the ending quite a lot.
To sum up, I have really liked this selection of Poe's stories, but I have decided this author isn't exactly for me. His writing style is too flowery and even boring at times, and the constant leitmotiv of death can get a bit overused if you read about it so many times in the same book.
This wasn't my first time reading Poe, but it was the first time I read so many tales penned by him in the same book. Although this is my second time reading him in English, before I had only read shortened versions for students, so I'm glad I could experience the whole extent not only of his work, but also of his style.
Of course, I have liked some stories more than others:
-The Assignation had an air of mystery and elegance which I really enjoyed (the fact that it was set in Italy helped :P).
-Ligeia was simply breathtakingly beautiful. Short, but so intense.
-How to Write a Blackwood Article surprised me with its humouristic and almost absurd tone. I certainly wasn't expecting that from Poe, but I think he made it work very well, as it really amused me.
-William Wilson was another surprise, as I had never heard about this story and it was very interesting. Döpelgangers are such a rewarding subject, and a very gothic one at that!
-The Murders in the Rue Morgue was one of Poe's stories I already knew. However, his entire length was too extense for me, and Dupin's analysing method too theoretical for my tastes, as I am more used to other detective schemes (ie. Sherlock Holmes). Nevertheless, I prefer this one to the rest of Dupin's stories, which frankly bored me.
-A Descent into the Maelström has such a powerful and stunning description of the scenery, which really made me enjoy this story a lot, thanks to its visual imagery.
-The Masque of the Red Death was another Poe's tale I had already read in English. Curiously, I enjoyed more that shortened version rather than this, maybe because the writing style here overwhelmed me.
-The Pit and the Pendulum is just MARVELOUS. I enjoyed this way more now, and Poe will never cease to amaze me with the ominous sense of fatality and death that you can feel here.
-The same goes for The Tell-Tale Heart. This is such a page-turner, it's totally gripping. It makes you *feel* the insanity of the narrator and, the more he talks, the more you know how twisted his mind is. Simply insanely brilliant and certainly my favourite!
-The Gold Bug: I had heard a lot about this story and I'm pleased to say I liked it a lot. Although the ending wasn't as spectacular as I had anticipated at the start, it also made me want to read faster to know what was going on.
-The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar was quite a surprise. Their themes aren't exactly new to Poe, but I liked the notion of mesmerisation and the ending quite a lot.
To sum up, I have really liked this selection of Poe's stories, but I have decided this author isn't exactly for me. His writing style is too flowery and even boring at times, and the constant leitmotiv of death can get a bit overused if you read about it so many times in the same book.
February 9, 2017
And then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help.
from "The Pit and the Pendulum"
This book includes some of Poe's most famous tales, such as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Read Death and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Some of the stories are really atmospheric, but others had me wondering whether he was ever going to finish lecturing me and start telling the story. There was one story that seemed totally out of place amongst the horror and revenant corpses, and that was "How to Write a Blackwood Article", a satirical tale about a woman being taught how to write sensational magazine articles such as those published in Blackwood's magazine.
from "The Pit and the Pendulum"
This book includes some of Poe's most famous tales, such as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Read Death and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Some of the stories are really atmospheric, but others had me wondering whether he was ever going to finish lecturing me and start telling the story. There was one story that seemed totally out of place amongst the horror and revenant corpses, and that was "How to Write a Blackwood Article", a satirical tale about a woman being taught how to write sensational magazine articles such as those published in Blackwood's magazine.
August 6, 2023
There are some AMAZING stories here (and I'm not talking about the ones all of us know about like the Tell-tale Heart), I mean The Oval Portrait or The Colloquy of Monos and Una - these two, they are so atmospheric, so dark and spooky, so beautifully written that I am amazed they aren't talked about more!
But then we get some head-scratching ones - and these are mostly the Dupin ones. And I don't get it, besides the Purloined letter these are just him monologuing how stupid everyone around him is and how smart he is. And unlike with Poirot, the reader is not given a chance really to follow along with the detective. Hmmm.
All in all Poe is a master when he is talking about the human soul, the darkness and beauty in it. Go read this.
But then we get some head-scratching ones - and these are mostly the Dupin ones. And I don't get it, besides the Purloined letter these are just him monologuing how stupid everyone around him is and how smart he is. And unlike with Poirot, the reader is not given a chance really to follow along with the detective. Hmmm.
All in all Poe is a master when he is talking about the human soul, the darkness and beauty in it. Go read this.
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