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Selected Tales
Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction.
Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem `mysterious' in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular - `The Fall of the House of Usher', `The Masque of the Red Death', `The Murders in the Rue Morgue; and `The Purloined Letter' - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem `mysterious' in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular - `The Fall of the House of Usher', `The Masque of the Red Death', `The Murders in the Rue Morgue; and `The Purloined Letter' - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1849
107 people are currently reading
611 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,801 books28.7k 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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March 3, 2020
I read this alongside the Penguin Horror collection The Raven: Tales and Poems, edited by Guillermo del Toro and S.T. Joshi; fifteen stories overlap in the two volumes. The Oxford Selected Tales has only short stories, and no poetry, and its introduction is more academic. Unlike the Penguin collection, it has explanatory notes, and notes are, frankly, necessary if you care about understanding Poe's "recondite references" as they are described by the Oxford collection's editor, David van Leer. (An appropriately creepy name for a Poe scholar?)
This Oxford collection seems better for getting an overview of Poe's stories. For instance, The Raven: Tales and Poems doesn't contain any of the Auguste Dupin detective stories ('The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Murder of Marie Roget' and 'The Purloined Letter'), omitting an important and famous aspect of Poe's writing and his influence on later fiction. All three of these are in the Oxford Selected Tales. I was bowled over by the similarities between 'Rue Morgue' and the Sherlock Holmes stories: there's the same flatmate setup where the narrator, the less brilliant man, acts as a reader-identification figure; there's the generally competent but periodically bumbling police chief; the detective-hero's bohemianism and icy rationality, and his mysterious knowledge of all layers of Parisian society from street ruffians to affairs of state. I first read Holmes stories when I was ten, became an instant fan, and for a long time I considered them among my favourite books. But the time I was half way through 'Rue Morgue' I'd theoretically knocked a star off every Holmes book I'd ever read for lack of originality (I don't think I've ever rated them on GR).
Kids often teach themselves deduction from the Holmes stories. (In my first proud utilisation of this, just after I had come home one day, I said that a room had been hoovered in the last few hours - as I could see the wheel marks on the carpet.) The Dupin stories don't have quite the same practical application - but 'The Gold Bug', which I think would be fairly described as an adventure story, could be used to create basic code and cryptography games by a similarly inclined kid. The breaking of a code is presented in stages that would allow the reader to run ahead with solving the puzzle themselves if so inclined, and check their answers in pages further on. I could see some kids having a lot of fun with that.
'The Gold Bug' brings me to another difference between the Oxford Selected Tales and the Penguin collection I read. Del Toro's and Joshi's selection of stories for Penguin contained very little in the way of negative racial stereotypes - and as I mostly read those stories first (albeit using the notes here), I got the impression Poe wasn't nearly as bad in that respect as a lot of 19th century authors. But it looks like that impression was partly created by omission. In 'The Gold Bug', for instance, there is a black valet who says 'Massa' and is shown with very stereotyped accent. On the other hand, he is perceptive at times and acts in loco parentis for his young gentleman; you could rephrase some of his sentences and they'd maybe not be too far from Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (a character who took a lot of inspiration from Jeeves). Only then he confuses left and right at a pivotal plot-point…
Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter are not as exciting as mystery/adventure stories. My opinion of Marie Roget was probably affected by knowing that it was based on the real American case of Mary Rogers. I'd heard about this case before, during a short phase of reading true crime articles, though I'm not sure that, without the introduction, I'd have remembered that Poe had based a story on it. Marie Roget seemed contrived to fit moralistic public opinion in a way I hadn't seen in any other examples of Poe's work. The Purloined Letter was quite dull, I thought, but is a forerunner of Holmes and Golden Age detectives helping with affairs of state - and perhaps also echoes the historical affair of the queen's necklace, that a few years later, would be the basis for Dumas' novel.
There is a vague background of eastern philosophies, and imperialism and its consumer products in many of Poe's stories, because it's the mid-19th century. Occasionally this is more overt, such as in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'. Initially, I thought it was going to be about time travel back to early colonial times, or *cringe in anticipation of a bad portrayal* First Nations people - but instead, as van Leer sums it up, "readers not only find themselves uncomfortably aligned with British colonialism; they are forced to confront the cultural condescension which allowed the West to appropriate Eastern ideas like reincarnation in the first place" (though there is a tidy awareness of intellectual lineage - an American writer sets a story about metempsychosis partly in the British Raj).
First Nations people as aggressors and opponents in war are mentioned in 'The Man that Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign' (the Bugaboo is a joke name invented by Poe; the Kickapoo are real, and were, in the mid-19th century, known as fierce mercenaries for hire, and for resisting white settler agreements aimed at taking Indian land. Thanks for this extra info to Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction by Michelle Robinson, which I stumbled on in Google Books.) The Man, a dashing veteran general, has been subject to many interpretations, considering him as symbolic of the fragile political situation of the USA and the denial of this in public life, or of certain philosophies, interpretations which may end up sounding accidentally denigrating of disability (as does van Leer's in the introduction). But the character could also be read on a more or less surface level, as I did, as someone determined not to be defined by his acquired disabilities, but for his other achievements. Because of the general's rank, society people largely go along with this, though they are a bit awkward. And it is unsurprising he is a huge fan of technological innovation, because of how much it has done for him personally, and because he lives at a time when human progress (especially to benefit, and following the ideas of, white westerners) was seen as an unalloyed good, with no thought to its impact on nature. 19th century science turns out to be a commoner theme than I expected in Poe: he is an SFF writer and an adventure writer, as well as a writer of gothic horror.
The final three stories not included in the other collection I read - 'The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether', 'The Domain of Arnheim' and 'Von Kempelen and his Discovery' could all be loosely grouped as being about attempts to improve the world. 'Arnheim' is the least similar to the others, about a voyage to a giant and exquisite garden created by a super-rich acquaintance of the narrator. Whilst a few of the descriptions were stunning, for the most part I didn't find this piece terribly interesting; like Poe's fairylands in his poetry, this side of 19th century aesthetics is just not my sort of thing.
The other two, meanwhile, share the theme of science of one sort or another. 'Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether' is an ambiguous story about a narrator's visit to a progressive asylum, with foreshadowings of the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement. It's not clear what the reader is supposed to think. This is probably a strength from a purely literary point of view, though nowadays some readers might find its stance uncomfortable, fitting with horror. The story has also been seen as a commentary on American politics of its time; I've read too little American party-political history to be able to comment on how the piece works in that respect. 'Von Kempelen' returns to a theme hundreds of years old - alchemy (also, like 'The Goldbug', connected to 19th century gold rushes). I found this a very satisfying treatment of it, which conjured feelings similar some of Neil Gaiman's fantasy short stories about wish fulfilment. However, as I'm finishing this review, four months after I finished reading these two Poe collections, the Poe science story which has stuck with me most strongly is one from the Raven collection, 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', about a dying man kept half-alive for months by the narrator's practice of mesmerism.
The Oxford Selected Tales is also better for getting a sense of just how many tropes Poe used, especially some of the more famous ones; if I hadn't read this collection as well as Raven, I'd have had no idea why orang-utans are a thing in Poe (and I wouldn't have got this joke/anecdote a friend posted, under the assumption that anyone who'd read Poe short stories would know about the orang-utans). There are three orang-utan stories in the Oxford collection, and only one, 'Hop-Frog', in Raven. In 'Hop-Frog', the orangs are costumes and signify people with less power getting their own back on those in charge, not as negative as in 'Rue Morgue'. But in both collections, there's ample evidence of some of his obsessions, such as stories narrated by guilty murderers (did Poe ever read James Hogg's Confessions & Memoirs of a Justified Sinner?), mesmerism, states between life and death, and the inevitable dead women. (What nobody seems to mention, though, is that at least a couple of those women are also intellectually brilliant, and the male narrators look up to them in a way I don't think I've ever seen in other fiction of this age.)
Poe's narrators often feel that someone else in the story is fascinating in a way they are not, similar to a lot of frame narratives including in Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham - and, for me, most strongly reminiscent of atmospheric favourites of my teenage years, The Secret History and Brideshead Revisited. (Especially when it became apparent Poe was also keen on the Classical world.) As I said in the Raven review, I've been stunned to realise Poe has influenced so much of the culture and aesthetics I loved since I was a teenager, and I barely had a clue. Some of the roots will be earlier, in 18th century gothic novels I haven't read, as well as, obviously, the Romantics, but Poe undoubtedly influenced American works like The Secret History and the art of Edward Gorey, and goth culture in general - as well as being important in inspiring the French symbolists and the late 19th century decadents, via the translation of his stories by Baudelaire himself. Between, and connecting, the Romantics and the Symbolists, there was Poe.
What does seem somewhat missing from this volume is stories of wild nature, the metaphysical and the futuristic, such as the IMO gripping sea adventure 'A Descent into the Maelstrom', and 'Monos and Una'. The latter is a fascinating oddity of metaphysical proto-SF, which feels strangely on point at a time of preoccupation with civilisational collapse, and resurgent right-wing ideas about human decline.
It seems absurd in retrospect that I'd hardly read Poe until I was over 40. He has torn through my impressions of [4 month old draft cuts out part way through this phrase … I think it was going to say] American literature, Americanness as well as of the gothic. He seems so un-American. His life seems, in some ways, medieval not 19th century - but that's only because most *famous* 19th century men had lives that were more ordered, or that were chaotic in fashionable ways, such as the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites. In the 19th century, there were all too many married 13-year olds and weird, unexplained early deaths among poor people who were remembered only by their own families. His own life contained many different types of unpleasantness and horror, and there was versatility in the types of horror in his stories - almost remarkably so compared with more specialist contemporary writers. There's even humour, so unexpected among the heavy dark romanticism; sometimes it works, but it can also be the groanworthy dad-joke sort, and an array of character names that Charles Dickens would have rejected. Just when I wanted to categorise Poe as a writer of mood, atmosphere and ornate sentences more than of plot, along would come silly humour, or a cracking story memorable for what actually *happened* in it.
(Read Sept-Nov 2019. Review finished March 2020 from a four month-old draft - after which, I crossed out *five* instances of this review on old to-do lists)
This Oxford collection seems better for getting an overview of Poe's stories. For instance, The Raven: Tales and Poems doesn't contain any of the Auguste Dupin detective stories ('The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Murder of Marie Roget' and 'The Purloined Letter'), omitting an important and famous aspect of Poe's writing and his influence on later fiction. All three of these are in the Oxford Selected Tales. I was bowled over by the similarities between 'Rue Morgue' and the Sherlock Holmes stories: there's the same flatmate setup where the narrator, the less brilliant man, acts as a reader-identification figure; there's the generally competent but periodically bumbling police chief; the detective-hero's bohemianism and icy rationality, and his mysterious knowledge of all layers of Parisian society from street ruffians to affairs of state. I first read Holmes stories when I was ten, became an instant fan, and for a long time I considered them among my favourite books. But the time I was half way through 'Rue Morgue' I'd theoretically knocked a star off every Holmes book I'd ever read for lack of originality (I don't think I've ever rated them on GR).
Kids often teach themselves deduction from the Holmes stories. (In my first proud utilisation of this, just after I had come home one day, I said that a room had been hoovered in the last few hours - as I could see the wheel marks on the carpet.) The Dupin stories don't have quite the same practical application - but 'The Gold Bug', which I think would be fairly described as an adventure story, could be used to create basic code and cryptography games by a similarly inclined kid. The breaking of a code is presented in stages that would allow the reader to run ahead with solving the puzzle themselves if so inclined, and check their answers in pages further on. I could see some kids having a lot of fun with that.
'The Gold Bug' brings me to another difference between the Oxford Selected Tales and the Penguin collection I read. Del Toro's and Joshi's selection of stories for Penguin contained very little in the way of negative racial stereotypes - and as I mostly read those stories first (albeit using the notes here), I got the impression Poe wasn't nearly as bad in that respect as a lot of 19th century authors. But it looks like that impression was partly created by omission. In 'The Gold Bug', for instance, there is a black valet who says 'Massa' and is shown with very stereotyped accent. On the other hand, he is perceptive at times and acts in loco parentis for his young gentleman; you could rephrase some of his sentences and they'd maybe not be too far from Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (a character who took a lot of inspiration from Jeeves). Only then he confuses left and right at a pivotal plot-point…
Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter are not as exciting as mystery/adventure stories. My opinion of Marie Roget was probably affected by knowing that it was based on the real American case of Mary Rogers. I'd heard about this case before, during a short phase of reading true crime articles, though I'm not sure that, without the introduction, I'd have remembered that Poe had based a story on it. Marie Roget seemed contrived to fit moralistic public opinion in a way I hadn't seen in any other examples of Poe's work. The Purloined Letter was quite dull, I thought, but is a forerunner of Holmes and Golden Age detectives helping with affairs of state - and perhaps also echoes the historical affair of the queen's necklace, that a few years later, would be the basis for Dumas' novel.
There is a vague background of eastern philosophies, and imperialism and its consumer products in many of Poe's stories, because it's the mid-19th century. Occasionally this is more overt, such as in 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'. Initially, I thought it was going to be about time travel back to early colonial times, or *cringe in anticipation of a bad portrayal* First Nations people - but instead, as van Leer sums it up, "readers not only find themselves uncomfortably aligned with British colonialism; they are forced to confront the cultural condescension which allowed the West to appropriate Eastern ideas like reincarnation in the first place" (though there is a tidy awareness of intellectual lineage - an American writer sets a story about metempsychosis partly in the British Raj).
First Nations people as aggressors and opponents in war are mentioned in 'The Man that Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign' (the Bugaboo is a joke name invented by Poe; the Kickapoo are real, and were, in the mid-19th century, known as fierce mercenaries for hire, and for resisting white settler agreements aimed at taking Indian land. Thanks for this extra info to Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction by Michelle Robinson, which I stumbled on in Google Books.) The Man, a dashing veteran general, has been subject to many interpretations, considering him as symbolic of the fragile political situation of the USA and the denial of this in public life, or of certain philosophies, interpretations which may end up sounding accidentally denigrating of disability (as does van Leer's in the introduction). But the character could also be read on a more or less surface level, as I did, as someone determined not to be defined by his acquired disabilities, but for his other achievements. Because of the general's rank, society people largely go along with this, though they are a bit awkward. And it is unsurprising he is a huge fan of technological innovation, because of how much it has done for him personally, and because he lives at a time when human progress (especially to benefit, and following the ideas of, white westerners) was seen as an unalloyed good, with no thought to its impact on nature. 19th century science turns out to be a commoner theme than I expected in Poe: he is an SFF writer and an adventure writer, as well as a writer of gothic horror.
The final three stories not included in the other collection I read - 'The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether', 'The Domain of Arnheim' and 'Von Kempelen and his Discovery' could all be loosely grouped as being about attempts to improve the world. 'Arnheim' is the least similar to the others, about a voyage to a giant and exquisite garden created by a super-rich acquaintance of the narrator. Whilst a few of the descriptions were stunning, for the most part I didn't find this piece terribly interesting; like Poe's fairylands in his poetry, this side of 19th century aesthetics is just not my sort of thing.
The other two, meanwhile, share the theme of science of one sort or another. 'Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether' is an ambiguous story about a narrator's visit to a progressive asylum, with foreshadowings of the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement. It's not clear what the reader is supposed to think. This is probably a strength from a purely literary point of view, though nowadays some readers might find its stance uncomfortable, fitting with horror. The story has also been seen as a commentary on American politics of its time; I've read too little American party-political history to be able to comment on how the piece works in that respect. 'Von Kempelen' returns to a theme hundreds of years old - alchemy (also, like 'The Goldbug', connected to 19th century gold rushes). I found this a very satisfying treatment of it, which conjured feelings similar some of Neil Gaiman's fantasy short stories about wish fulfilment. However, as I'm finishing this review, four months after I finished reading these two Poe collections, the Poe science story which has stuck with me most strongly is one from the Raven collection, 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', about a dying man kept half-alive for months by the narrator's practice of mesmerism.
The Oxford Selected Tales is also better for getting a sense of just how many tropes Poe used, especially some of the more famous ones; if I hadn't read this collection as well as Raven, I'd have had no idea why orang-utans are a thing in Poe (and I wouldn't have got this joke/anecdote a friend posted, under the assumption that anyone who'd read Poe short stories would know about the orang-utans). There are three orang-utan stories in the Oxford collection, and only one, 'Hop-Frog', in Raven. In 'Hop-Frog', the orangs are costumes and signify people with less power getting their own back on those in charge, not as negative as in 'Rue Morgue'. But in both collections, there's ample evidence of some of his obsessions, such as stories narrated by guilty murderers (did Poe ever read James Hogg's Confessions & Memoirs of a Justified Sinner?), mesmerism, states between life and death, and the inevitable dead women. (What nobody seems to mention, though, is that at least a couple of those women are also intellectually brilliant, and the male narrators look up to them in a way I don't think I've ever seen in other fiction of this age.)
Poe's narrators often feel that someone else in the story is fascinating in a way they are not, similar to a lot of frame narratives including in Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham - and, for me, most strongly reminiscent of atmospheric favourites of my teenage years, The Secret History and Brideshead Revisited. (Especially when it became apparent Poe was also keen on the Classical world.) As I said in the Raven review, I've been stunned to realise Poe has influenced so much of the culture and aesthetics I loved since I was a teenager, and I barely had a clue. Some of the roots will be earlier, in 18th century gothic novels I haven't read, as well as, obviously, the Romantics, but Poe undoubtedly influenced American works like The Secret History and the art of Edward Gorey, and goth culture in general - as well as being important in inspiring the French symbolists and the late 19th century decadents, via the translation of his stories by Baudelaire himself. Between, and connecting, the Romantics and the Symbolists, there was Poe.
What does seem somewhat missing from this volume is stories of wild nature, the metaphysical and the futuristic, such as the IMO gripping sea adventure 'A Descent into the Maelstrom', and 'Monos and Una'. The latter is a fascinating oddity of metaphysical proto-SF, which feels strangely on point at a time of preoccupation with civilisational collapse, and resurgent right-wing ideas about human decline.
It seems absurd in retrospect that I'd hardly read Poe until I was over 40. He has torn through my impressions of [4 month old draft cuts out part way through this phrase … I think it was going to say] American literature, Americanness as well as of the gothic. He seems so un-American. His life seems, in some ways, medieval not 19th century - but that's only because most *famous* 19th century men had lives that were more ordered, or that were chaotic in fashionable ways, such as the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites. In the 19th century, there were all too many married 13-year olds and weird, unexplained early deaths among poor people who were remembered only by their own families. His own life contained many different types of unpleasantness and horror, and there was versatility in the types of horror in his stories - almost remarkably so compared with more specialist contemporary writers. There's even humour, so unexpected among the heavy dark romanticism; sometimes it works, but it can also be the groanworthy dad-joke sort, and an array of character names that Charles Dickens would have rejected. Just when I wanted to categorise Poe as a writer of mood, atmosphere and ornate sentences more than of plot, along would come silly humour, or a cracking story memorable for what actually *happened* in it.
(Read Sept-Nov 2019. Review finished March 2020 from a four month-old draft - after which, I crossed out *five* instances of this review on old to-do lists)
May 28, 2021
Although I'd never read any Edgar Allan Poe prior to this collection, I'd heard of at least seven tales within it thanks to popular culture (mostly The Simpsons). My Mum, by contrast, seemed wholly unfamiliar with Poe's oeuvre on our weekly Zoom call so Dad invited me to explain it. I first tried to describe his writing style. The three qualities that stood out to me were, first, bedecking everything with literary allusions and quotes in latin, ancient greek, French, and Italian, some invented. Secondly, sentences meandering through shelves of subclauses, qualifications, justifications, and descriptions of furnishings. Thirdly, first person narrators beginning their tales with elaborate explanations of their delicate sensibilities, extreme inherited sensitivity to everything in the world, and fearful trembling on the precipice of madness. At first I found this extremely mannered style hard to bear, then I warmed to it while reading aloud and subsequently enjoyed it.
As to the content of the tales, the themes evidently captured the anxieties of time, if their popularity is anything to go by. The modern reader (if I may call myself that) is struck by the large quantity of female corpses and copious use of hard drugs. Indeed, I was moved to bark with laughter at 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'. This recounts the extraordinary visions of a man named Bedloe, which the narrator links with mesmerism and possibly reincarnation. I, on the other hand, was more inclined to look for explanation in Bedloe's choice of breakfast:
It is always good to be reminded that many Victorians must have frequently been high as balls. I could not help but notice other narrators of acutely delicate sensibility etc etc noting in passing their fondness for opium. Perhaps you aren't haunted by supernatural horrors so much as by withdrawal symptoms, gentlemen? It occurs to me that our current recurrent moral panics about widespread use of psychoactive medications seem often to assume dependence upon over-the-counter drugs is a new phenomenon. It certainly isn't and the mid-Victorians had unfettered access to most of the drugs we now prohibit and condemn. Moreover, and possibly this is coincidental, throughout the collection the only psychoactive substance shown to cause violent behaviour is alcohol.
Although Poe's effusive writing style remains consistent throughout, the themes and prevailing tone of the stories varied quite considerably. As I recounted to my Mum (who must by this point have been tired of the topic), some tales are progenitors and pioneers of later genres. The three mysteries solved by Dupin, for instance, prefigure subsequent enthusiasm for detective fiction. They are narrated by his companion and housemate, which would become a highly successful format for Watson and Holmes. I found the Dupin stories intriguing for their differences from later crime fiction. Dupin, despite his lack of money, lives on his friend's goodwill rather than setting up a detective agency. When prevailed upon by the prefect of police to turn his intellect towards solving a crime, he does so with the greatest possible superciliousness and a distinct lack of urgency. Before any indication is given of whodunnit or why, a philosophical lecture is required and the preeminence of Dupin's intelligence must be expounded. Although this makes him sound awful, I appreciated this offhand attitude. Dupin and his narrator spend their days reading, thinking, and sleeping, only venturing outside for walks at night when its quiet. Truly an enviable lifestyle; whyever would anyone want to interrupt it by solving crimes? The mysteries themselves are of no great import. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' does a grave injustice to orang-outangs. 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' isn't solved at all, although the notes tell me that the real life murder Poe based it upon was. 'The Purloined Letter' has a solution I easily arrived at while Dupin was still making introductory remarks. Nonetheless, there is charm to this triplet of tales, as Dupin's lectures are more involving than the crimes he occasionally pays attention to.
Of the other tales, the four Dead Woman vignettes ('Berenice', 'Morella', 'Ligeia', and 'Eleanora') made me wonder how difficult it was for doctors in the 1840s to determine whether someone was alive or dead. I was disinclined to contemplate possible psycho-sexual connotations therein. I found 'The Fall of House of Usher' very satisfying to read aloud when in a bad temper, as it is a triumph of gloomy verbiage over substance. I liked the conceit of 'William Wilson' - realising that you are the evil twin and your good doppelganger keeps thwarting your crimes. 'The Masque of the Red Death' is more unsettling during a pandemic than it would usually be. 'The Gold-Bug' is more of an adventure yarn than a horror tale and features a racist depiction of a freed slave named Jupiter. It is notable that this story censors damn as d--n but freely uses the N word. Tumblr memes prevented me from taking 'The Cask of Amontillado' seriously. 'The Domain of Arnheim' read to me as a satirical comment on extreme wealth and the pointless ways that it is used, which seemed surprisingly timely. Other shorter tales proved unmemorable.
The stories that genuinely unsettled me were 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Black Cat', 'The Imp of the Perverse', and to a slightly lesser extent 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. The former is by far the most memorably macabre and the only one that made me pause to think, "What the hell, Poe! This is fucked up!" The combination of darkness, rats, and slow progressions of esoteric torture is worthy of a Culture novel. What makes it truly horrible, I think, is that you're not told why or how the prisoner ended up in the Inquisition's dungeons and his torturers are invisible. 'The Black Cat', 'The Imp of the Perverse', and 'The Tell-Tale Heart', by contrast, unsettle because they are narrated by murderers. Poe conveys the unbalanced, violent, and neurotic minds of these murderous men powerfully in only a few pages. The unpleasantness of 'The Black Cat's narrator is exacerbated because he murders pets as well as a person, while claiming to love animals. 'The Imp of the Perverse', meanwhile, evokes the titular concept with alarming vividness:
After an inauspicious beginning, I found considerable enjoyment in Poe's heightened gothic sensationalism. While some of his stories are more interesting as historical objects than as genre fiction, others remain suitably frightening. I have to respect his commitment to such an overblown writing style, as it must have required strenuous efforts to keep track of such sentences. It's tricky enough to do so when reading them. I find such a style unusual in short stories as opposed to novels. There is a satisfying richness to his sumptuous phrases, voluptuous descriptions, and extremities of emotion.
As to the content of the tales, the themes evidently captured the anxieties of time, if their popularity is anything to go by. The modern reader (if I may call myself that) is struck by the large quantity of female corpses and copious use of hard drugs. Indeed, I was moved to bark with laughter at 'A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'. This recounts the extraordinary visions of a man named Bedloe, which the narrator links with mesmerism and possibly reincarnation. I, on the other hand, was more inclined to look for explanation in Bedloe's choice of breakfast:
His imagination was singularly vigorous and creative; and no doubt it derived additional force from the habitual use of morphine, which he swallowed in great quantity, and without which he would have found it impossible to exist. It was his practice to take a very large dose of it immediately after breakfast, each morning - or rather immediately after a cup of strong coffee, for he ate nothing in the forenoon - and then set forth alone, or attended only by a dog, upon a long ramble...
It is always good to be reminded that many Victorians must have frequently been high as balls. I could not help but notice other narrators of acutely delicate sensibility etc etc noting in passing their fondness for opium. Perhaps you aren't haunted by supernatural horrors so much as by withdrawal symptoms, gentlemen? It occurs to me that our current recurrent moral panics about widespread use of psychoactive medications seem often to assume dependence upon over-the-counter drugs is a new phenomenon. It certainly isn't and the mid-Victorians had unfettered access to most of the drugs we now prohibit and condemn. Moreover, and possibly this is coincidental, throughout the collection the only psychoactive substance shown to cause violent behaviour is alcohol.
Although Poe's effusive writing style remains consistent throughout, the themes and prevailing tone of the stories varied quite considerably. As I recounted to my Mum (who must by this point have been tired of the topic), some tales are progenitors and pioneers of later genres. The three mysteries solved by Dupin, for instance, prefigure subsequent enthusiasm for detective fiction. They are narrated by his companion and housemate, which would become a highly successful format for Watson and Holmes. I found the Dupin stories intriguing for their differences from later crime fiction. Dupin, despite his lack of money, lives on his friend's goodwill rather than setting up a detective agency. When prevailed upon by the prefect of police to turn his intellect towards solving a crime, he does so with the greatest possible superciliousness and a distinct lack of urgency. Before any indication is given of whodunnit or why, a philosophical lecture is required and the preeminence of Dupin's intelligence must be expounded. Although this makes him sound awful, I appreciated this offhand attitude. Dupin and his narrator spend their days reading, thinking, and sleeping, only venturing outside for walks at night when its quiet. Truly an enviable lifestyle; whyever would anyone want to interrupt it by solving crimes? The mysteries themselves are of no great import. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' does a grave injustice to orang-outangs. 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' isn't solved at all, although the notes tell me that the real life murder Poe based it upon was. 'The Purloined Letter' has a solution I easily arrived at while Dupin was still making introductory remarks. Nonetheless, there is charm to this triplet of tales, as Dupin's lectures are more involving than the crimes he occasionally pays attention to.
Of the other tales, the four Dead Woman vignettes ('Berenice', 'Morella', 'Ligeia', and 'Eleanora') made me wonder how difficult it was for doctors in the 1840s to determine whether someone was alive or dead. I was disinclined to contemplate possible psycho-sexual connotations therein. I found 'The Fall of House of Usher' very satisfying to read aloud when in a bad temper, as it is a triumph of gloomy verbiage over substance. I liked the conceit of 'William Wilson' - realising that you are the evil twin and your good doppelganger keeps thwarting your crimes. 'The Masque of the Red Death' is more unsettling during a pandemic than it would usually be. 'The Gold-Bug' is more of an adventure yarn than a horror tale and features a racist depiction of a freed slave named Jupiter. It is notable that this story censors damn as d--n but freely uses the N word. Tumblr memes prevented me from taking 'The Cask of Amontillado' seriously. 'The Domain of Arnheim' read to me as a satirical comment on extreme wealth and the pointless ways that it is used, which seemed surprisingly timely. Other shorter tales proved unmemorable.
The stories that genuinely unsettled me were 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Black Cat', 'The Imp of the Perverse', and to a slightly lesser extent 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. The former is by far the most memorably macabre and the only one that made me pause to think, "What the hell, Poe! This is fucked up!" The combination of darkness, rats, and slow progressions of esoteric torture is worthy of a Culture novel. What makes it truly horrible, I think, is that you're not told why or how the prisoner ended up in the Inquisition's dungeons and his torturers are invisible. 'The Black Cat', 'The Imp of the Perverse', and 'The Tell-Tale Heart', by contrast, unsettle because they are narrated by murderers. Poe conveys the unbalanced, violent, and neurotic minds of these murderous men powerfully in only a few pages. The unpleasantness of 'The Black Cat's narrator is exacerbated because he murders pets as well as a person, while claiming to love animals. 'The Imp of the Perverse', meanwhile, evokes the titular concept with alarming vividness:
...Yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall - this rushing annihilation - for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination - for this very cause do we now most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, so we more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.
After an inauspicious beginning, I found considerable enjoyment in Poe's heightened gothic sensationalism. While some of his stories are more interesting as historical objects than as genre fiction, others remain suitably frightening. I have to respect his commitment to such an overblown writing style, as it must have required strenuous efforts to keep track of such sentences. It's tricky enough to do so when reading them. I find such a style unusual in short stories as opposed to novels. There is a satisfying richness to his sumptuous phrases, voluptuous descriptions, and extremities of emotion.
October 17, 2023
“Misery is manifold.” (p. 13)
These tales are truly dark and disturbing. The outlook is bleak for characters of the fairer sex, who tend to suffer disease or murder, with some coming back after death, in one way or another. There is also a surprisingly high prevalence of orangutangs (or “Ourang-Outangs”) in the stories. Overall, the collection is impressive and fully delivers on the horror front. It makes for perfect Halloween reading. Below, are the stories that I thought were the best, with short summaries of each and illustrative quotes from therein:
The Black Cat
A depraved man does cruel, evil things to everything and everyone.
“One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree … hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense.” (p. 232)
MS. Found in a Bottle
A mysterious ship is encountered at sea with an unusually old crew.
“As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliance upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood.” (p. 7)
The Tell-Tale Heart
A tale about the consequences of insanity intersecting with cold-blooded murder.
“Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” (p. 193)
Hop-Frog
A court jester seeks vengeance against an abusive king.
“The resemblance shall be so striking, that the company of masqueraders will take you for real beasts—and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished.” (p. 314)
Ligiea
When a man remarries after his first wife dies, strange and terrible things start to happen.
“Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.” (p. 29)
Berenicë
A man with “monomania,” or a “nervous intensity of interest,” reacts oddly and coldly to his cousin’s illness.
“In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings, with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.” (p. 17)
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
A tour of a mad house reveals the unexpected.
“To repose confidence in the understanding or discretion of a madman, is to gain him body and soul.” (p. 269)
“When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.” (p. 278)
The Masque of the Red Death
A king plays the fiddle, so to speak, while his kingdom and people burn from an epidemic.
“The ‘Red Death’ has long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous … But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.” (p. 129)
The Man That Was Used Up
A stunning general may not be what he seems to be.
“He was a remarkable man—a very remarkable man—indeed one of the most remarkable men of the age.” (pp. 41-42)
These tales are truly dark and disturbing. The outlook is bleak for characters of the fairer sex, who tend to suffer disease or murder, with some coming back after death, in one way or another. There is also a surprisingly high prevalence of orangutangs (or “Ourang-Outangs”) in the stories. Overall, the collection is impressive and fully delivers on the horror front. It makes for perfect Halloween reading. Below, are the stories that I thought were the best, with short summaries of each and illustrative quotes from therein:
The Black Cat
A depraved man does cruel, evil things to everything and everyone.
“One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree … hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense.” (p. 232)
MS. Found in a Bottle
A mysterious ship is encountered at sea with an unusually old crew.
“As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliance upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood.” (p. 7)
The Tell-Tale Heart
A tale about the consequences of insanity intersecting with cold-blooded murder.
“Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” (p. 193)
Hop-Frog
A court jester seeks vengeance against an abusive king.
“The resemblance shall be so striking, that the company of masqueraders will take you for real beasts—and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished.” (p. 314)
Ligiea
When a man remarries after his first wife dies, strange and terrible things start to happen.
“Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.” (p. 29)
Berenicë
A man with “monomania,” or a “nervous intensity of interest,” reacts oddly and coldly to his cousin’s illness.
“In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings, with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.” (p. 17)
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
A tour of a mad house reveals the unexpected.
“To repose confidence in the understanding or discretion of a madman, is to gain him body and soul.” (p. 269)
“When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.” (p. 278)
The Masque of the Red Death
A king plays the fiddle, so to speak, while his kingdom and people burn from an epidemic.
“The ‘Red Death’ has long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous … But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.” (p. 129)
The Man That Was Used Up
A stunning general may not be what he seems to be.
“He was a remarkable man—a very remarkable man—indeed one of the most remarkable men of the age.” (pp. 41-42)
September 4, 2024
For my full review, visit me at https://mrsbrownsbooks.wordpress.com/...
A collection of gothic, haunting tales from famous writer, Edgar Allan Poe, there were some stories in this collection that I really loved… and others that I found incredibly tedious. Unfortunately, for the majority, the stories didn’t interest me that much, despite the ones I did enjoy being very good. Luckily, this is an anthology where you can skip through stories that don’t interest you, although I am proud to say that I stuck with it and read every single one – it was quite a challenge!
A collection of gothic, haunting tales from famous writer, Edgar Allan Poe, there were some stories in this collection that I really loved… and others that I found incredibly tedious. Unfortunately, for the majority, the stories didn’t interest me that much, despite the ones I did enjoy being very good. Luckily, this is an anthology where you can skip through stories that don’t interest you, although I am proud to say that I stuck with it and read every single one – it was quite a challenge!
December 7, 2018
Crime, Horror, and a Bit of Black Comedy
7 December 2018
Well, what can I really say about this book other than that it is a collection of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Well, I could probably leave it at that, particularly since I have already written reviews on some of the stories in this book, just not all of them. However, I won’t be using this to review the other stories in this collection, but rather saying a few things about Poe’s writing. One thing I should mention though is that this collection only contains short stories, so unfortunately The Raven hasn’t been included (though I’m sure I can easily find it on the internet somewhere, particularly since its copyright has lapsed).
So, the thing that stood out is how Poe reminded me a lot of other writers, such as Kafka, Lovecraft, and of course Doyle. Sure, since Poe literally invented the detective genre, of course there is going to be an influence on Doyle, but I do wonder to what extent he influenced other writers, particularly Kafka. The thing is that many of Poe’s works seem to be more weird and wonderful as opposed to simply a collection of horror stories. Then again, the gothic horror genre is a lot different to what we generally consider to be horror these days.
I guess you could also consider the works experimental, though I sort of wonder whether it is at all possible to be experimental these days. In a way it feels that pretty much everything has been done, and pretty much all of the genres have been explored, so what could there possibly be that can yet be discovered. It almost seems to be that to be experimental these days is to literally become incomprehensible, but then again that seems to have already been done as well, and I do notice that the incomprehensible works tend not to grace the shelves of an airport bookshop. Then again, only those books that tend to be palpable to the reading public end up there anyway.
Maybe that is why I tend to avoid general literature, namely because they aren’t actually doing anything new, or exploring anything new. In a way it is actually quite hard to fully explore, say, a Clive Cussler novel, because these types of books tend to be written for entertainment as opposed to being literary masterpieces. And of course, there are all those Lord of the Rings clones that seem to appear in the fantasy sections on an almost regular basis
One thing about Poe, at least from what I gleaned from the introduction, is that he really wasn’t one of those people that dealt with authority all that well. Apparently he was kicked out of Westpoint academy due to insubordination – so he became a writer. It actually sounds as if writers, especially influential writers, tend not to follow the rules, but rather prefer to break out on their own, to stick their noses up to authority. However, there is also the suggestion that one of his goals was to encourage American literature. Mind you, when he was writing, the United States was still a relatively new country, and in a way still trying to determine its identity. In a way a lot of countries seem to attempt to discover their identity through literature. However, can that identity be forced? I guess that is why I tend to shy away from books written by Australians. In a way it feels as if they are trying, and failing, to create Australian literature. Then again, we do live in a globalised world, so maybe we should put away the idea of countries producing their own literature, and embrace a much more multicultural approach.
7 December 2018
Well, what can I really say about this book other than that it is a collection of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. Well, I could probably leave it at that, particularly since I have already written reviews on some of the stories in this book, just not all of them. However, I won’t be using this to review the other stories in this collection, but rather saying a few things about Poe’s writing. One thing I should mention though is that this collection only contains short stories, so unfortunately The Raven hasn’t been included (though I’m sure I can easily find it on the internet somewhere, particularly since its copyright has lapsed).
So, the thing that stood out is how Poe reminded me a lot of other writers, such as Kafka, Lovecraft, and of course Doyle. Sure, since Poe literally invented the detective genre, of course there is going to be an influence on Doyle, but I do wonder to what extent he influenced other writers, particularly Kafka. The thing is that many of Poe’s works seem to be more weird and wonderful as opposed to simply a collection of horror stories. Then again, the gothic horror genre is a lot different to what we generally consider to be horror these days.
I guess you could also consider the works experimental, though I sort of wonder whether it is at all possible to be experimental these days. In a way it feels that pretty much everything has been done, and pretty much all of the genres have been explored, so what could there possibly be that can yet be discovered. It almost seems to be that to be experimental these days is to literally become incomprehensible, but then again that seems to have already been done as well, and I do notice that the incomprehensible works tend not to grace the shelves of an airport bookshop. Then again, only those books that tend to be palpable to the reading public end up there anyway.
Maybe that is why I tend to avoid general literature, namely because they aren’t actually doing anything new, or exploring anything new. In a way it is actually quite hard to fully explore, say, a Clive Cussler novel, because these types of books tend to be written for entertainment as opposed to being literary masterpieces. And of course, there are all those Lord of the Rings clones that seem to appear in the fantasy sections on an almost regular basis
One thing about Poe, at least from what I gleaned from the introduction, is that he really wasn’t one of those people that dealt with authority all that well. Apparently he was kicked out of Westpoint academy due to insubordination – so he became a writer. It actually sounds as if writers, especially influential writers, tend not to follow the rules, but rather prefer to break out on their own, to stick their noses up to authority. However, there is also the suggestion that one of his goals was to encourage American literature. Mind you, when he was writing, the United States was still a relatively new country, and in a way still trying to determine its identity. In a way a lot of countries seem to attempt to discover their identity through literature. However, can that identity be forced? I guess that is why I tend to shy away from books written by Australians. In a way it feels as if they are trying, and failing, to create Australian literature. Then again, we do live in a globalised world, so maybe we should put away the idea of countries producing their own literature, and embrace a much more multicultural approach.
May 19, 2022
MS. Found in a Bottle- 2.5⭐
Berenicë- 4⭐
Morella- 3⭐
Ligeia- 3.5⭐
The Man that was Used Up- 2⭐
The Fall of the House of Usher- 4⭐
William Wilson- 3.5⭐
The Man of the Crowd- 4⭐
The Murders in the Rue Morgue- 4⭐
Eleonora- 5⭐
The Masque of the Red Death- 3⭐
The Pit and the Pendulum- 4⭐
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt- 1.5⭐
The Tell-Tale Heart- 4⭐
The Gold-Bug- 2.5⭐
The Black Cat- 5⭐
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains- 4⭐
The Purloined Letter- 2⭐
Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether- 2.5⭐
The Imp of the Perverse- 2⭐
The Cask of Amontillado- 5⭐
The Domain of Arnheim- 2.5⭐
Hop-Frog- 1⭐
Von Kempelen and His Discovery- 2.5⭐
Berenicë- 4⭐
Morella- 3⭐
Ligeia- 3.5⭐
The Man that was Used Up- 2⭐
The Fall of the House of Usher- 4⭐
William Wilson- 3.5⭐
The Man of the Crowd- 4⭐
The Murders in the Rue Morgue- 4⭐
Eleonora- 5⭐
The Masque of the Red Death- 3⭐
The Pit and the Pendulum- 4⭐
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt- 1.5⭐
The Tell-Tale Heart- 4⭐
The Gold-Bug- 2.5⭐
The Black Cat- 5⭐
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains- 4⭐
The Purloined Letter- 2⭐
Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether- 2.5⭐
The Imp of the Perverse- 2⭐
The Cask of Amontillado- 5⭐
The Domain of Arnheim- 2.5⭐
Hop-Frog- 1⭐
Von Kempelen and His Discovery- 2.5⭐
December 10, 2016
I really wanted to enjoy these stories - be chilled by them - but I just didn't. I even found myself questioning why the Spanish Inquisition (The Pit & the Pendulum) would want someone to die out of the public gaze, rather than at an Auto da Fe.
Apologies to all Poe fans...
Apologies to all Poe fans...
May 25, 2024
As expected, Poe‘s collection of stories vary in almost every aspect which made it very pleasant to read further on. Every chapter heralded a new atmosphere, new shades of horror and sudden discoveries, ultimately leading to one sitting there in complete astonishment for some stories’ turning appeared so shocking that it became really enjoyable and almost tingeling to continue reading. I believe my favorites to be Berenicë, Ligeia, The Man that was Used Up, The Man of the Crowd, The Masquerade of the Red Death (very enlightening), The Pit and the Pendulum (possibly the most claustrophobic and disturbing one), The Gold-Bug (for I must proudly admit that I was able to solve the riddle all by myself), unfortunately NOT the Black Cat as it was simply too brutal to be generally entertaining, The Tarr and Fether (this was the most chilling and frightening of all in my opinion), The Imp of the Perverse (a very fascinating theory about the universal perverseness that lies in every single one of us, although it does not imply what one might think at first but rather the perverseness of, if one commits an untraceable murder and to the world unsolvable, the untraceability itself forces the murderer to uncover and surrender on his own back to the world), and last but not least Hop-Frog, which tells the story about an abused dwarf who ultimately sets his king and all his ministers on fire in the middle of a masquerade. They burn alive in front of all spectators, dressed as eight orang-outangs, kind of creepy to be honest.
Yet besides all these stories of which brilliant writing I did not even get hold of, others were quite contrary without motion to even getting boring and therefore hard to get through.
I still hope to get to read The Balloon Hoax one day, which was actually the reason I bought this book in the first place until I had to realize that the Selected Tales I have once held in hands and which contained possibly this one most excellent and thrilling story of all, was rather the original edition of Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe of the year 1967 and not the one I now possess.
However, we will see.
Yet besides all these stories of which brilliant writing I did not even get hold of, others were quite contrary without motion to even getting boring and therefore hard to get through.
I still hope to get to read The Balloon Hoax one day, which was actually the reason I bought this book in the first place until I had to realize that the Selected Tales I have once held in hands and which contained possibly this one most excellent and thrilling story of all, was rather the original edition of Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe of the year 1967 and not the one I now possess.
However, we will see.
October 25, 2022
These tales have cover a vast range and therefore differ greatly in quality. The ones more popular are still very good but there are also many that were just too wordy and convoluted and just not very enjoyable. I had read a lot of these in German before and remembered them much better… but for some of these it was just work to get through them.
July 26, 2023
This an excellent read if you like an older style of literature. All the tales in the book are engaging and as it says on the cover, the ordinary becomes extraordinary with Poe's unique poetical style. I originally got the book for The Fall of the House of User but I liked a quite a few of the vary varied stories included. There is even a comedy in the book which I didn't expect at all.
May 5, 2022
4.5 🌟
Some stories are great, extraordinary turn of event in the end, the best of a horror and drama. The unexpected craziness, the psychotic breakdown of individual. All are worth reading.
But, they are so so so verbose, if brevity is the soul of wit, then Poe is clearly an enemy of it.
Some stories are great, extraordinary turn of event in the end, the best of a horror and drama. The unexpected craziness, the psychotic breakdown of individual. All are worth reading.
But, they are so so so verbose, if brevity is the soul of wit, then Poe is clearly an enemy of it.
January 29, 2023
" 53++!305))6*;4826)4+.)4+);806*;48!8`60))85;]8*:+*8!83(88)5*!; 46(;88*96*?;8)*+(;485);5*!2:*+(;4956*2(5*-4)8`8*; 4069285);)6 !8)4++;1(+9;48081;8:8+1;48!85;4)485!528806*81(+9;48;(88;4(+?3 4;48)4+;161;:188;+?; " The Gold-Bug
November 4, 2020
The tales collected here, can be broadly classified into two categories - one, the grosteque, the fantastic, satirical if brooding and dark; the other mystery, like a puzzle, some which are too detailed and a bit, rambling, if I may use that term.
It is obvious which were the ones I enjoyed most. The other category gave me a feeling that Mr Poe was trying hard to establish himself as an intellectual while writing those. The beauty of Mr Poe's stories were their gradual flow, where the narrator is usually a historian, or a confessor; where the stories were bizarre, flamboyant, shocking and hugely different from the prevalent dramas or romances. The tales where the author has studied an idea or a thought, studied it into minute detail, addressing all the facets which he could, sound more like thesises than attention arresting stories.
Nonetheless, it was a pleasure to have gotten re-acquainted with the predecessor of the marvellous duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson! Sir Doyle modelled his famous sleuth too close to Poe's Dupin. One can't help but feel like they are two peas of a pod... so similar as to appear twins.
It is obvious which were the ones I enjoyed most. The other category gave me a feeling that Mr Poe was trying hard to establish himself as an intellectual while writing those. The beauty of Mr Poe's stories were their gradual flow, where the narrator is usually a historian, or a confessor; where the stories were bizarre, flamboyant, shocking and hugely different from the prevalent dramas or romances. The tales where the author has studied an idea or a thought, studied it into minute detail, addressing all the facets which he could, sound more like thesises than attention arresting stories.
Nonetheless, it was a pleasure to have gotten re-acquainted with the predecessor of the marvellous duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson! Sir Doyle modelled his famous sleuth too close to Poe's Dupin. One can't help but feel like they are two peas of a pod... so similar as to appear twins.
October 27, 2012
As expected, this was a great collection of stories. My personal favorite has to be 'The Pit and the Pendulum', which is by far the scariest story of the bunch. Other ones I loved: 'The Man of the Crowd', 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (despite the rather silly denouement), 'The Masque of the Red Death', 'The Tell-Tale Heart', 'The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether' and 'Hop-Frog'. The only story I genuinely didn't like because I had no idea what it was doing there, was 'The Domain of Arnheim'. As far as I can tell, it's about some garden or other. Don't know what's up with that.
February 2, 2017
I found these stories very dark and sometimes very depression, some of the stories highlight are fear of death and also shows a beauty within it, but like everything that pass we have decay that follows.
February 14, 2022
Wow! Just wow!
Liking this book wasn’t expected at all! I was taken aback by it’s definite and absolute beauty.
The dark theme is a favorite.
The divine description of nature is calming.
He magically poured this eccentric combination of motifs all over the book, and the usage of word is captivating— I couldn’t resist but to reread some sentences more than once; all because of the grand attractiveness.
Liking this book wasn’t expected at all! I was taken aback by it’s definite and absolute beauty.
The dark theme is a favorite.
The divine description of nature is calming.
He magically poured this eccentric combination of motifs all over the book, and the usage of word is captivating— I couldn’t resist but to reread some sentences more than once; all because of the grand attractiveness.
July 30, 2018
As a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, I enjoyed the detective stories here by Poe that predate the detective genre of Holmes and Watson. This is a great book to read around Halloween time and in contrast to the more graphic violence in movies today, the book keeps it pretty tame, while still maintaining the suspense and intrigue going well.
June 26, 2021
Beautiful, musical and captivating style of writing. I especially love William Wilson, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold Bug, The Purloined Letter, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, The Imp of the Perverse, and The Cask of Amontillado.
March 29, 2024
"For Poe... problems of identity did not originate in consciousness but resulted from the foreignness of the environment in which mentality found itself. Minds did not imagine horrors but saw clearly the horribleness of their universe." Introduction, page xvii
Poe is generally regarded by many literature snobs as sub-par (and to be frank, I find his short stories often mediocre and uneven in quality), but his influence on gothic literature is unquestionable. Here is my scattershot ranking of the stories collected in this Oxford anthology:
5 stars: Nearly perfect, must-read
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe is ironically at his best in this detective fiction/mystery story than in his pure gothic stories, IMO; this story was my favorite of the collection)
- The Pit and the Pendulum (wonderfully chilling gothic narrative; you feel everything the narrator feels, and this is the story where Poe pulls off this technique the best)
- The Black Cat (best characterization of the narrator, and genuinely horror-fueled)
- The Cask of Amontillado (this required me to re-read it to fully grasp it, but its literary merit as a subtle revenge story is apparent)
- Hop-Frog (some of Poe's best story writing, as much of his earlier work is plagued by too much description and run-on sentences; the story is also satisfying)
4 stars: Good, memorable, impactful
- MS. Found in a Bottle (I liked the thematic elements and ending especially)
- The Tell-Tale Heart (quite good, but the "hook" of the story leaves a bit to be desired; why is the eye so hated?)
- The Gold-Bug (a treasure hunt story with a subtle eerie atmosphere; some criticize its supposed racism, but I think Poe was quite subversive in his portrayal of Jupiter and his relationship with Legrand here)
- The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (fun, but predictable)
3 stars: Interesting elements, but noticeably flawed execution
- The Man that was Used Up (an interesting concept that is butchered by poor writing)
- William Wilson (too cliche and predictable for modern audiences, but I'm sure quite inventive at the time)
- Eleonora (the best of his "death of a beautiful woman" stories, but still rather forgettable)
2 stars: not good, unsatisfying, but I understand its inclusion in this anthology
- Berenice (the "death of a beautiful woman" stories were simply not to my liking; the concept is shallow and his execution is repetitive; of the 3 in this tier, maybe this one is the best)
- Morella (see above; felt pointless)
- Ligeia (we get it, you have mommy-problems Poe; but more seriously, this one is just a long-winded drag; at least Morella was short)
- The Fall of the House of Usher (just meh, I honestly can't articulate why; I think its fault for me is its over-reliance on describing the surroundings and house, which is just boring)
- The Man of the Crowd (rather boring, but interesting concept)
- The Masque of the Red Death (some people seem to like this one, but I can't get past the clunky writing)
- A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (this needed a re-draft and a new ending; the concept of this one is harmed by the unimaginative conclusion)
- The Purloined Letter (quite mid in the Detective Dupin trilogy; should have been shorter, but the set-up is amusing; I love the word "purloined")
- The Imp of the Perverse (more an essay than a story; interesting idea, but forgettable ultimately)
- Von Kempelen and his Discovery (not good, but there is a seed of an interesting idea; reimagined in the modern day, I could see the concept of "making gold" being replaced with AI and its future implications)
1 star: boring, pointless, feels like a rough draft, not of any merit within Poe's already uneven body of work
- The Mystery of Marie Roget (do not make the mistake I did, SKIP THIS STORY; you are wasting your life if you read this (unless you want to become a Poe scholar, I guess); damn this was an exercise in pointless tedium; I'm legitimately mad how much time I wasted waiting for something to happen since this is technically a sequel to the Rue Morgue story; just look up the actual true crime mystery of Mary Cecilia Rogers, much more interesting)
- The Domain of Arnheim (why, for all that is good and holy, was this pointless essay included in this anthology? The writing is admittedly good, but if you think this goes anywhere, spoiler alert, it doesn't; it's just masturbatory)
I understand why Poe is still famous to this day, but at times I can't get over how little his sordid life (his pedophilic and incestuous marriage, mostly) is talked about, even today. I'm no fan of "cancellation", but this is a case of separating the art from the artist for me (which is extra difficult because every story is from the POV of a narrator who is essentially a self-insert of Poe himself). And when I read his murder stories, I wonder... did this man murder someone? I just have to wonder if these stories aren't some sort of assuagement for his guilt. But alas, there is no evidence. But how could there be? "Truth is not always in a well."
Poe is generally regarded by many literature snobs as sub-par (and to be frank, I find his short stories often mediocre and uneven in quality), but his influence on gothic literature is unquestionable. Here is my scattershot ranking of the stories collected in this Oxford anthology:
5 stars: Nearly perfect, must-read
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe is ironically at his best in this detective fiction/mystery story than in his pure gothic stories, IMO; this story was my favorite of the collection)
- The Pit and the Pendulum (wonderfully chilling gothic narrative; you feel everything the narrator feels, and this is the story where Poe pulls off this technique the best)
- The Black Cat (best characterization of the narrator, and genuinely horror-fueled)
- The Cask of Amontillado (this required me to re-read it to fully grasp it, but its literary merit as a subtle revenge story is apparent)
- Hop-Frog (some of Poe's best story writing, as much of his earlier work is plagued by too much description and run-on sentences; the story is also satisfying)
4 stars: Good, memorable, impactful
- MS. Found in a Bottle (I liked the thematic elements and ending especially)
- The Tell-Tale Heart (quite good, but the "hook" of the story leaves a bit to be desired; why is the eye so hated?)
- The Gold-Bug (a treasure hunt story with a subtle eerie atmosphere; some criticize its supposed racism, but I think Poe was quite subversive in his portrayal of Jupiter and his relationship with Legrand here)
- The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (fun, but predictable)
3 stars: Interesting elements, but noticeably flawed execution
- The Man that was Used Up (an interesting concept that is butchered by poor writing)
- William Wilson (too cliche and predictable for modern audiences, but I'm sure quite inventive at the time)
- Eleonora (the best of his "death of a beautiful woman" stories, but still rather forgettable)
2 stars: not good, unsatisfying, but I understand its inclusion in this anthology
- Berenice (the "death of a beautiful woman" stories were simply not to my liking; the concept is shallow and his execution is repetitive; of the 3 in this tier, maybe this one is the best)
- Morella (see above; felt pointless)
- Ligeia (we get it, you have mommy-problems Poe; but more seriously, this one is just a long-winded drag; at least Morella was short)
- The Fall of the House of Usher (just meh, I honestly can't articulate why; I think its fault for me is its over-reliance on describing the surroundings and house, which is just boring)
- The Man of the Crowd (rather boring, but interesting concept)
- The Masque of the Red Death (some people seem to like this one, but I can't get past the clunky writing)
- A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (this needed a re-draft and a new ending; the concept of this one is harmed by the unimaginative conclusion)
- The Purloined Letter (quite mid in the Detective Dupin trilogy; should have been shorter, but the set-up is amusing; I love the word "purloined")
- The Imp of the Perverse (more an essay than a story; interesting idea, but forgettable ultimately)
- Von Kempelen and his Discovery (not good, but there is a seed of an interesting idea; reimagined in the modern day, I could see the concept of "making gold" being replaced with AI and its future implications)
1 star: boring, pointless, feels like a rough draft, not of any merit within Poe's already uneven body of work
- The Mystery of Marie Roget (do not make the mistake I did, SKIP THIS STORY; you are wasting your life if you read this (unless you want to become a Poe scholar, I guess); damn this was an exercise in pointless tedium; I'm legitimately mad how much time I wasted waiting for something to happen since this is technically a sequel to the Rue Morgue story; just look up the actual true crime mystery of Mary Cecilia Rogers, much more interesting)
- The Domain of Arnheim (why, for all that is good and holy, was this pointless essay included in this anthology? The writing is admittedly good, but if you think this goes anywhere, spoiler alert, it doesn't; it's just masturbatory)
I understand why Poe is still famous to this day, but at times I can't get over how little his sordid life (his pedophilic and incestuous marriage, mostly) is talked about, even today. I'm no fan of "cancellation", but this is a case of separating the art from the artist for me (which is extra difficult because every story is from the POV of a narrator who is essentially a self-insert of Poe himself). And when I read his murder stories, I wonder... did this man murder someone? I just have to wonder if these stories aren't some sort of assuagement for his guilt. But alas, there is no evidence. But how could there be? "Truth is not always in a well."
March 18, 2024
Poe can (almost, not quite, not at all) rival Kafka as an enthroned author of the classical cannon who does not get anywhere near enough attention for how funny, how persistently playful he is.
The eponymous women of the ladies' tale may be supranatural, but the literary narrator may just as well be raving in a pastiche of a romantic hero, all consumptive paleness and theatre rouge, all bathethic pathos, revelling in revilement. The Dupin tales are purposefully anticlimactic, the supernatural turns out to be banal and faintly ridiculous, played nonchalant. Consistently, the father of the American Gothic battles enigma with convoluted mysticism - nowhere less satisfying than in The Gold Bug. There's a lot of love for obscure reference (this edition being particularly able to trace them) and the indulging in it, and ratcheting up the silly and the serious... thus, for example, the pun-purpose of The Man that was Used Up.
I think that, although he far predates it, Poe is insuperably, superbly camp
The eponymous women of the ladies' tale may be supranatural, but the literary narrator may just as well be raving in a pastiche of a romantic hero, all consumptive paleness and theatre rouge, all bathethic pathos, revelling in revilement. The Dupin tales are purposefully anticlimactic, the supernatural turns out to be banal and faintly ridiculous, played nonchalant. Consistently, the father of the American Gothic battles enigma with convoluted mysticism - nowhere less satisfying than in The Gold Bug. There's a lot of love for obscure reference (this edition being particularly able to trace them) and the indulging in it, and ratcheting up the silly and the serious... thus, for example, the pun-purpose of The Man that was Used Up.
I think that, although he far predates it, Poe is insuperably, superbly camp
September 22, 2025
A remarkably mixed collection. In a book of 300 pages, I only truly rate around 50 - yet, those 50 pages are most impressive.
The edition is burdened by repetition — too many tales of dying women, morbidity for its own sake, and endless padding that just hasn’t aged well. It’s a strange case of how something can be hugely influential without necessarily being particularly edifying or even enjoyable for the modern reader.
However - Poe’s masterpieces justify his reputation: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold-Bug, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Purloined Letter all remain short stories of the highest quality.
When Poe is bad… he’s borderline unreadable - but when he’s good, he’s outstanding.
The edition is burdened by repetition — too many tales of dying women, morbidity for its own sake, and endless padding that just hasn’t aged well. It’s a strange case of how something can be hugely influential without necessarily being particularly edifying or even enjoyable for the modern reader.
However - Poe’s masterpieces justify his reputation: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold-Bug, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Purloined Letter all remain short stories of the highest quality.
When Poe is bad… he’s borderline unreadable - but when he’s good, he’s outstanding.
October 2, 2025
This is pretty unreal. Some scary stories with good punch, bit of depth, and strong emotional verses.
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Love the short story format, every word counts and paints a lovely picture. Concise - no fluff, while still sounding beautiful.
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I mean this guy invented detective fiction, has had his stories and poems adapted & transformed so many times, and basically popularised short stories as a concept. Give him a go I say.
No matter how fascinating & scary his writing is (it is) - it will never trump his actually real life he lived; now that's disturbing.
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Love the short story format, every word counts and paints a lovely picture. Concise - no fluff, while still sounding beautiful.
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I mean this guy invented detective fiction, has had his stories and poems adapted & transformed so many times, and basically popularised short stories as a concept. Give him a go I say.
No matter how fascinating & scary his writing is (it is) - it will never trump his actually real life he lived; now that's disturbing.
December 30, 2021
okay technically i didn’t finish it but it’s because i lost the book but!!!! i’m still counting it as a read because i read 100 pages of that tiny little script and i technically read multiple stories and i would’ve finished it if i had the chance!!! also i love the stories but he didn’t need to spend like 3 pages to describe wallpaper that had no relevance to the story
August 25, 2023
Although he shows a gift for language, I found this a hard read. Too much description and not enough plot. The first stories all start with pages and pages describing the subject's appearances without the story moving much. On the 4th story having read copious amounts about someone's teeth, it gets a bit tedious. Constant niche references were tough to decipher.
September 18, 2023
While some stories are great, others drag on indefinitely (The Domain of Arnheim, for example).
My favorites:
the classics: The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat
but also Hop-Frog, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, and The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather
My favorites:
the classics: The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Black Cat
but also Hop-Frog, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, and The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather
December 12, 2024
I love Poe’s obsession with the beating heart, the pulsing life, and of being buried alive. His stories are a wonder, a unique macabre way of looking at the world. This collection held his bests in my opinion, but in some tales the language was very dated and hard to get through. Still would recommend it though!
Read
May 13, 202514/02/25 - 13/05/25
DNF
I just find reading Poe so difficult and mostly unengaging. There's some.meh stuff, and some great stuff, but I can never find the willpower to read him. Here's where I got to:
MS IN A BOTTLE (3)
BERENICË (2.5)
MORELLA (3.5)
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (4)
WILLIAM WILSON (4.5)
Sorry Poe!
DNF
I just find reading Poe so difficult and mostly unengaging. There's some.meh stuff, and some great stuff, but I can never find the willpower to read him. Here's where I got to:
MS IN A BOTTLE (3)
BERENICË (2.5)
MORELLA (3.5)
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (4)
WILLIAM WILSON (4.5)
Sorry Poe!
March 17, 2022
Found my love for Edgar Allan Poe through this book. It has some of his best stories from Tale-Tell Heart, The Pit..., Cask..., Hop Frog, and even murdering orangutans. I highly recommend this book and him as an author!
October 31, 2021
4.5 bc I was never too keen on his mystery-inclined pieces , but Poe is Poe ✨💖
April 21, 2022
luv me some poe
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