Edgar Allan Poe: Tales of Terror and Madness

by Edgar Allan Poe

“There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.”   Edgar Allan Poe wrote the passage above to describe the interior décor of Prince Prospero’s castle in “The Masque of the Red Death,” but he might just as easily have written it to describe the contents of this book. Its nineteen stories abound with characters—among them gibbering madmen, ominous doppelgängers, walled-up victims, and living-dead corpses—whose experiences are colored by the emotional responses Poe hoped to evoke. Consider, if you will, the following tales of terror and   The Fall of the House of Usher. The melancholy House of Usher was a crumbling pile whose sad decline was but a mirror of its family’s psychic state.   The Masque of the Red Death. The pestilence came like a thief in the night, and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.   The Tell-Tale Heart. The murderer protested that he wasn’t mad. His gruesome crime proved otherwise.   The Black Cat. Murder will out, as a consequence of what’s been walled in.   The Premature Burial. There are certain themes of which the interest is all absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. Or are they?   The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. A mesmeric trance forestalled the worst ravages of the patient’s death—but it could do so only for so long.   The Cask of Amontillado. The unthinkable fate that awaited Fortunato in the nitre-crusted catacombs beneath the river’s bed only proved that he was the most ill-named of victims.   Hop-Frog. The last jest of the man in motley was hideous—and truly no laughing matter.   The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. A stowaway’s lot is never an easy one, especially when shipwreck, cannibalism, and the imminent threat of death shape it.  

Genres: Horror

440 pages, Hardcover

Published March 31, 2020

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

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect.