Nostalgia Reader’s Reviews > The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe > Status Update

"The Tell-Tale Heart": A guilty conscience comes a-knocking.

"The Masque of the Red Death": It's just so PERFECT. Also, Poe, I see your pun about "the Time that flies" easily equating to Beelzebub and ooHHHH, wait, are the seven rooms the Seven Deadly Sins??! UGH, SEE, it's just so multi-layered, I'm always picking up new things with every reread.

"The Oblong Box": It's funny because it's so obvious, and the narrator is so naive.

"'Thou Art The Man'": This one's getting downgraded a half-ish star, just because it drags too much, but the ending is still *chef's kiss*. If only Dupin's stories could have been this fun!

The yearly short story reading commences! And with a story not even in this volume, "The Oval Portrait." I did print it out in a little booklet and stuck it in here though, so technically.... No page updates, but I'll probably note when I finish a story.

Hop-Frog: 5 stars (reread). Such sweet revenge.

King Pest: 5 stars (reread). So weird, so good, so bizarre, so horrifying, and to top it all off, there's a crap top of allegory.

the Cask of Amontillado: 5 stars (reread). Always and forever the bestest! Even though there are definitely weirder and better stories, the general setting and backdrop (carnival) of it just is *chef's kiss*.

The Sphinx: 2 stars. That was.... very stupid. I was sort of already spoiled for the end (even then, it still was just super apparent what was happening throughout the story), and it just... wasn't.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar: 5 stars (reread). Not nearly as shockingly disgusting as the first read through was, but still a horrifying concept!

The Black Cat: 4 stars (reread; down 0.5 star) Still remains sooooo messed uppp. Also, this just confirms my theory that Dostoevsky was a Poe fan.

The Masque of the Red Death: 4 stars (reread). Just.... *gestures broadly at everything*.