Edgar Allan Poe: The BBC Radio Collection

by Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Cook, Peter Mackie

Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated stories, as heard on BBC Radio - plus bonus documentaries and two thrilling original dramas.

The master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe has inspired generations of horror writers with his chilling Gothic tales and is also credited with inventing the detective fiction genre in The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

This radio collection features five of his classic tales - The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Oblong Box, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death, read by David Horovitch, Brian Gear, James Aubrey, Sean Barrett and Don Gilet. Also included is his renowned poem The Raven, read by Patrick Romer.

Here, too, are adaptations of Poe's suspenseful story of piracy and slavery, The Gold Bug, starring Clarke Peters and Rhashan Stone, and his pioneering mystery story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, starring James Fleet and Andrew Scott.

Radio 3's The Essay: Loving the Raven sees Poe enthusiasts Andrew Taylor, Joanne Harris, Louise Welsh, Mark Lawson and Kim Newman discussing the author's enduring legacy and cult status, while in Adventures in Poetry: The Raven, Peggy Reynolds explores Poe's most iconic work.

Also included are two original dramas featuring Poe himself. Obsessed by a woman's unsolved murder, Edgar Allan Poe is presented with a disturbing revelation on the night before his death in Peter Mackie's The Real Mystery of Marie Roget, starring Ed Bishop. And in Christopher Cook's The Strange Case of Edgar Allan Poe, starring Kerry Shale and John Moffatt, Poe's famous detective C. Auguste Dupin investigates the bizarre death of his creator.

Content warning: The Gold Bug is set in a time when slavery was still prevalent in America and contains racist language from that era.

Track listing:
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Oblong Box
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Masque of the Red Death
The Raven
The Gold Bug
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Essay: Loving the Raven
Adventures in Poetry: The Raven
The Real Mystery of Marie Roget
The Strange Case of Edgar Allan Poe

Genres: Classics, Audiobook

7 pages, Audiobook

Published October 15, 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

[OdinJR · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a recording that I listened to loaned from BorrowBox. I find it difficult to review, there are some stories from Edgar Allan Poe that were five star rating at the beginning of the recording. Many horror writers list him as an influence and I fully understand why. They are timeless masterpieces. Subsequent to these are sone documentaries on the life of Poe, I was not interested in these and disturbed to hear he married his 13 year old cousin - times were different then but even so. Then there were two pieces written by other authors with Poe as a character, interesting but not what I was looking for. My recommendation would be to borrow this recording, listen to the stories written by Poe and then move on, then you have a five star rating.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The readings of actual Poe stories included in this collection are excellent. The dramatic adaptations for radio are awkward, and to be honest, I skipped through much of them, as I have not read the stories they are based on, and did not want to spoil any future reading of the original stories. The critical essays offer no real original or interesting insights - they are somewhat dated.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays and some of the other content wasn't my favorite, but I enjoyed the readings of Poe's story. It served as a good refresher for Netflix's release of Flanagan's “The Fall of the House of Usher”

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - This is a nice collection of Poe. I love the BBC Radio productions. The ending essays weren't what I came for but added an interesting look at Poe and his stories. Would definitely revisit this to hear some favorite Poe stories by excellent narrators.

[Sara Tilley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extravagantly flamboyant tales are cut down to size and read beautifully. Despite losing plot details, the famous stories are still very good and much darker than Roger Corman films.
The Raven (unabridged) is beautifully sonorific and OTT, and it’s amazing that Rue Morgue was written 50 years before Conan Doyle’s Sign of Four.
Now dipping into the originals.

[Stuart Wakefield · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointed with this. The actual stories, and the performances, were terrific, but I was disappointed by the “filler” - numerous essays about Poe.

I’d have preferred more of Poe’s writing.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened up until the Gold Bug and whilst I enjoyed the narratives whilst they were playing, I never had any motivation to put the audiobook back on which I think says a lot.

[Gregg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gearing up for the Netflix series “The Fall of the House of Usher” next month.

[Bini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Straight retellings of the book are fantastic
Everything else is very hot or miss

[Simone Blanchard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I love Edgar Allan Poe and enjoyed hearing his work but I think the ones written by others and also some of the dramatizations were just not good

[Katie A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

eh.