Oh. So Poe's not just a writer for goth teens? Whoa. I mean.. that stuff was good. Like... whoa.

Incredible, grab-your-bandaids-because-your-cuticles-will-be-bleeding-after-this, terrifying, and utterly thrilling horror! There were a few bland bits throughout but what Poe did well he did shockingly well.

Whoa. ( )

This collection, which also features The Tell Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, Ligeia, The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, The Premature Burial and The facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, was a great introduction into the macabre world of Edgar Allan Poe. For years, I had stayed away thinking that his stories would be nightmare-inducing, and I suppose they would have been in my younger day, since they don't lack in morbid and grisly details, to which I suppose I've become more or less desensitized over the years. What makes these tales so memorable is that Poe imbues every aspect of his short stories with a sense of doom and despair, making even the pictures on the walls, the draperies and window panes and books and plants and stones sound ominous, and elevates murder, cruelty and various manners of dying, to an art form. Perhaps because I'm such an animal lover, I found The Black Cat, in which the hateful protagonist describes the various manners in which he tortured his cat, difficult to stomach. My favourite story was The Fall of the House of Usher, which with poetic prose builds up nicely to the inevitable catastrophe, and in this case does not involve sadistic and cruel schemes, or hardly, by comparison. Overall, I found the recurring themes of the stories too repetitive to my liking, but I'm sure I'll be reading more Poe in future all the same. ( )

Included in this collection: 10 novellas and short stories:

* The Pit and the Pendulum
* The Tell Tale Heart
* The Masque of the Red Death
* Ligeia
* The Raven
* The Cask of Amontillado
* The Fall of the House of Usher
* The Black Cat
* The Premature Burial
* The facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Some interesting common themes seem to emerge in this collection: premature burial; murders where bodies are walled up; murders committed by the narrator who is then betrayed by his own imagination or by spirits coming from the world of the dead.

The readings are well done. There is suitably spooky music between stories.
I hadn't realised The Raven was actually poetry (basically rhyming couplets). The stories I liked the best were The Tell-Tale Heart in which the beating of the heart comes back to haunt a murderer; The Masque of the Red Death (which sound s a bit like the modern ebola virus); and The Black Cat.

It is a long time since I have read any Poe. The language of the stories is a bit dated. However the article in Wikipedia says: Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. ( )