The Raven and Other Tales of Horror: Edgar Allen Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

Genres: Classics, Horror

342 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2023

About the author

The 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...

Reviews

[Edgar Postema · Rating 3 out of 5]

Happy to dive into edgar allen poe's work but also happy it's over

[Sterling Wesson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Close to a year reading one book and it’s not even long… whoops! I think I heavily prefer Poe when he is playing around with the esoteric unfathomable rather than the more human and human stories. This wasn’t a bad book, I just had a lot of fun at the start and then it felt like a bit of a slog to get through the rest.

[Ernesto · Rating 3 out of 5]

This edition contains a good amount of Poe's emblematic work, I enjoyed some more than others and the 19th century vocabulary was a mild inconvenience for me, but you can't expect to avoid this writing style when reading classics.

Personally, I've found Poe's prose a bit pompous and given his background I can understand where it comes from; alongside my reading I couldn't help but feel the author's need to stand out with complex writing and quoting phrases in French and Latin to develop most of his most noticeable work, this coupled with a storytelling structure that promotes ambiguity will captivate or lose most readers, I found myself in between, often deeply focused on a short story's plot, other times I was vaguely intrigued by it and sometimes I just wanted to complete a chapter and be done with the story.

Fortunately there might be a story for each specific taste and some of Poe's stories present in this book are well worth the hassle of the tangling and slow paced experience of the less (personally) appealing ones.

[Aaron Brookes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were amazing; others somewhat weakened the overall book. I had to bear in mind that Poe was writing from the 1800s because his wording and sentence structure was complex, in some cases, distracting me from the book itself and taking away from the overall experience. I am glad to have read some of the classics, but doubt I will ever read this book again. Notable mentions are The Black Cat; The Raven; and the Tell Tale Heart

[Elmo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed several of the stories in this collection, especially the detective-focused ones. That said, this isn’t a style of writing I personally love, which is reflected in my rating. The book contains many different tales, all with an eerie tone, and it can be difficult to get into at first. However, with time, my brain seemed to adapt to the writing style, making the stories easier to follow.

[jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at page 164 😭 i hate DNFing books but i just couldn’t get through this. none of these stories were particularly “horror” based to me & i struggled with the fact it’s just all shorts. a shame cause i normally love classic lit but this was just meh

[Ez · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75*

I disliked more of these than I enjoyed. The order these were edited together made it hard to get through, as the middle stories are some of his worst.
I think I just might not be a Poe fan

[Jessica Grainger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flop

[Michael Crichlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aside from the nautical fiction, I really enjoyed this book.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me. Some of the stories were good (the masque of the red death, hop-frog) but many were an absolute slog and bore (MS found in a bottle - I'm looking at you here).

[Vonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always fun to read the horror tales during Halloween.

[Pola · Rating 3 out of 5]

you will feel happy when u finish it :)

[Sorren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a wide range of writings, some undeniable classics (The Raven), others.... far from it
Poe certainly loved his wordiness, for better and for worse