A Classic Crime Collection

by Edgar Allan Poe

'Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! --do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.'

The melancholy, brilliance, passionate lyricism and torment of Edgar Allen Poe are all well represented in this timeless collection. Here, in one volume, are his masterpieces of mystery, terror, humour and adventure, including stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Pit and the Pendulum, and his finest lyric and narrative poetry -The Ravenand Annabel Lee, to name just a few - that defined American romanticism and secured Poe as one of the most enduring literary voices of the nineteenth century.

Genres: Classics, Horror

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 2015

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

[Lostaccount · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I was a fan of Poe, but it turns out I'm not. The purple prose killed this book for me.
Disspointing and annoying half the time.
Full review to follow when I have more time.

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

nope.

[Marinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read this short stories when I didn't had anything else to read.

I've enjoyed some of them more than the others. I really liked: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Read Death and The Gold-Bug.

Others I've find a little bit dull, boring and not special. I wasn't a big fan of the poems either - the only two who stood out to me were The Raven (obviously) and the Evening Star.

[Maurice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edgar Allan Poe's Classic Crime Collection manifests Poe's mastery of writing poetry and prose. Contrary to him being known as the "goth before it was cool," his short stories dig deeper than just the premise of death. Most of the plots revolve around the metaphysical mind-frame of a character and deaths did not just happen for the sake of death. I might be mistaken but It's amazing to learn that stories like these have already existed in 1800s without predecessors and to feel that hints of inspiration were taken from these stories for future works that would become classics in their own genre like Arthur Conan Doyle's and Shirley Jackson's.

[Margaret Holbrook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars from me. Some of the stories I knew and some I'd seen as films but the films are often slightly different to the fiction. A lot of tales of death and near death; of after death and problems preying on the mind - perhaps to be expected. I enjoyed the read although some tales I didn't enjoy or appreciate as much as others. My favourites from this collection were 'The Gold Bug' and 'William Wilson', both new to me.

And some of the tales, well I couldn't help but read them and hear the voice of Mr Vincent Price, and for someone of my generation I guess that's to be expected as well.

[LJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at three quarters.
I thought I was going to love this collection. The cover is also very beautiful.
I read the first story 'A tell-tale heart' and really did like it. I also really liked the poem 'Alone'. They were creepy, weird and I thought the rest would be like this - a perfect Halloween read.
Except that, for me, they weren't. They were just a little bit dull, boring and confusingly strange.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Nathalie (keepreadingbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally I got around to reading a Poe collection. I've read a few of his stories over the years as a part of my studies and I found them all very good (The Black Cat and The Fall of the House of Usher were among them), and so I decided that I would give a larger collection a shot.
I must confess now that I enjoy his more 'supernatural' tales more than his detective/mystery ones. Almost all his stories (supernatural and otherwise) begin with the main character being very dramatic and taking up several pages describing himself, his feelings and his mental state before getting down to business. This worked fine for me when I read a story here and there in between other works, but oh, how dull it is when it is the same way EVERY story begins. I also found it rather anti-climactic that the 'solving' of a case in the mysteries was just one character telling in great detail what had happened from one end to the other AFTER he himself had solved it (Rue Morgue, Purloined Letter, Gold Bug etc.) - it took the excitement right out of the story, even though the building up of the mystery was usually very exciting for me.
I do of course realise that the detective from Rue Morgue and Purloined Letter was a great inspiration for Arthur Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and the idea of this intellectual and analytical genius is brilliant, but I'm not sure it's very well executed in these tales.
I want to underline, however, that I very much still enjoy his more supernatural tales - especially how he toys with what is real and what isn't. I think my favourite of this bunch turned out to be the very last one, William Wilson, mainly because the other few I really liked I had read before.

When it comes to his poems I am probably not the best of judges. I mostly enjoy contemporary poetry in free verse, and Poe's poetry is neither contemporary nor free verse. As with some of his tales I found them overly dramatic, but in general I didn't feel much when reading them. One or two touched me, The Valley of Unrest and also A Dream Within a Dream - they seemed rather more in touch with their subject and not as dramatic as the others.

I am giving this 3 stars, mainly because I recognise Poe's talent and genius, but also because the select tales I like, those I really like.