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Three Tales of Horror
Three spine-chilling horror stories by three masters of the macabre. In "Hop-Frog", a gruesome tale by America's father of Gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe, a king's jester, both a dwarf and a cripple, exacts a terrible revenge. Ambrose Bierce's "The Boarded Window" is a frightening and deeply sad story of death, grief, and terror on the frontier by the classic writer of the American West. In "The Body Snatcher", by Robert Louis Stevenson, the British author better known for his children's books, morally corrupt medical students rob graves of fresh corpses until on black night when they meet a grisly fate.
58 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
10.1k books29k 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 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 31, 2019
While I enjoyed this compilation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog”, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Boarded Window” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher”, the only one I would classify as “super natural horror” would be the last one, and only at the end. Mostly the first and last stories dealt with the horror of what humans can do to one another and the middle one was had natural horror in it. Though it was no less scary for having the natural scare. 4, solid stars for three solid stories.
October 11, 2011
(a) Poe "Hop-Frog" -- pretty good. Draws you in, and you empathize.
(b) Ambrose Bierce "The Boarded Window", slow, but a slight punch at the end.
(c) Robert Loius Stevenson "The Body Snatcher" -- boring all the way through.
(b) Ambrose Bierce "The Boarded Window", slow, but a slight punch at the end.
(c) Robert Loius Stevenson "The Body Snatcher" -- boring all the way through.
June 1, 2016
Three short stories by Poe, Bierce and Stevenson that don't hold up with time. The best story was by Bierce, not because it was particularly compelling, but because it all led up to one great final sentence.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews