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In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator is a person who kills an old man. Even though the old man has never wronged him, he hates the old man’s eye because it looks like a vulture’s eye. He goes in every night for 7 nights and shines a light on the eye and then he kills him on the 8th night. In the “Tell Tale Heart” there are three themes: be careful who you trust, killing makes you crazy, and mental illness should be addressed.
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One theme is to be careful who we trust. The narrator (who is the main character) says “he had never wronged me, but the eye is what I hate.” He is crazy because he hates someone because of the way they look. He is willing to kill him for that reason. That means everyone needs to be careful. He had planned the murder very carefully because he made sure there was no blood stain by killing him and immediately putting the body in a bathtub and cutting up the body.

I have only this one to say:

Come and see the master of gothic horror novel at work!!!
If you dare..

Simple The Best!!!!

Great stories..
By the very master itself..
And by the way, a very good choosen collection indeed!!

Poes life and literary work is a mystery to me:
Nobody does it better and you have to experience it for yourself..

Dean;)

It was beautiful writing and definitely intriguing. I loved the suspense towards the end of the story.

i only read:
stories:
-the black cat
poems:
-romance
-the valley of unrest
-the raven

RTC. Check out Federico who has a good review

Once a year, if you observe the horror holiday Halloween, you should read one or more of Poe’s chilling stories. Why not “The Tell Tale Heart”? I just this evening heard my neighbor Ann read it aloud before a gathering of block party neighbors in my street.

“True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.”

The incomparable Vincent Price reading the story in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTxyN...

“And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”

Here’s the 1960 film version of the story:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19bn1a

“I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart.”

You want to read it for yourself or frighten your friends and family? Here you go:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe...

When I was first a high school English teacher I used to tape poster board over my classroom windows to keep the light completely out, dress in a long black choir robe, dab dark makeup near my eyes and read it over a single candle. Boo! Happy Halloween!

I would like to give Edgar Allan Poe due respect for his writings. They are remarkable and quite unlike any others. That being said, once you have read one story, you have basically read them all. Of course, a few stand out - I will always love The Raven. A great, eery read during October - I added some extra fun and brought out my old Allan Parson's Project CD dedicated to Poe, "Tales of Mystery and Imagination." The duo made a perfect Halloween backdrop.

“I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen.”

“It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall and the rain fell upon my head—and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.”

Say what?? Is it rain or is it blood, or is it a plebeian praenomen? And WTF is a praenomen anyway?

Edgar Allan Poe is not the easiest author to get on with. From time to time he lapses into writing weird indecipherable passages like the ones above. People often accuse  H.P. Lovecraft of writing purple prose, but Lovecraft has nothing on Poe whose prose is so purple he is probably Prince’s  (RIP) favorite author*. Still, the stories in this collection are mostly great if you can get through “the language barrier”. Certainly for Halloween you would be hard pressed to find a better anthology.

When professional reviewers review an anthology they don't normally review each story in the book. Fortunately I am not a pro and this is how I like to do it, so here we go:

1. The Tell-Tale Heart
One of Poe’s best known stories. Our unreliable narrator decides to kill his granddad because he has an annoyingly weird eye. That is just the beginning of the story, what transpires is literally insane and quite disturbing.


2. The Black Cat
Another unnamed psychotic narrator /protagonist kills his pet cat and later his wife. Trouble starts for him when he attempts to kill a second cat.

The most violent story in the book, lots of madness, mayhem, and spooky felines. Gives me the willies. An excellent Halloween read.

3. The Cask of Amontillado
A story of revenge for unknown offences. Whathisname lures his friendenemy to his creepy wine cellar with the promise of a cask of vintage Amontillado.

Interestingly this story seems to have brought Poe back into vogue with the Tumblr generation. The Cask of Amontillado has become a meme! (Thank you, Cecily for the info).

4. Fall of the House of Usher
Probably as famous as The Tell-Tale Heart. Quite sane unnamed protagonist visits his almost sane friend Roderick Usher at his creepy creaky and cracked in the middle house, where he lives with his dying sister Madeline. The poor lady soon dies and things go from bad to…. OMG! That ending!


Read twice for full effect.

Don’t miss hilarious  Thug Notes Summary & Analysis of this story (Youtube clip)

5. The Masque of the Red Death
One of Poe’s more overtly supernatural stories (most of them seem to be psychological horror). Prince Prospero throws a masquerade ball during a time when the “Red Death” plague has gone more viral than Rick Rolling. Different coloured rooms, a creepy clock that chimes every hour and unfailingly stops all the partiers in their track as they can never get used to it. At midnight, as the party is in full swing, a mysterious hooded figure in a horrible robe and wearing a scary mask gatecrashes…


Very spooky.

6. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
“My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine months ago it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis.”

LOL! Well, that is going to work out well for him – not! Some people just have very strange hobbies. Our unnamed narrator is very much into hypnotism and conducts an experiment on his pal M. Valdemar who is literally at death’s door. The results are unexpected and horrifying.



7. Ligeia
A bit of a long-winded ghost story. Opium-fueled hallucination or supernatural shenanigan. You decide!

8. The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Aha! Surely you have heard of this one! Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, prototype pre-Holmes ace detective investigates an impossible murder in Paris while mocking the The Parisian police for their lack of imagination.

“The Parisian police, so much extolled for acumen, are cunning, but no more. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method of the moment.”

Inspector Lestrade probably has a cousin working there. There is even a prototype Watson narrating the story, unfortunately he is a Poe narrator so he does not get a name. Dupin is awesome but a very long-winded fellow. His elaborate explanations go on and on and Watson his sidekick should have said “My dear fellow! TMI!”. Still a great story, though and more violent asnd graphic than any Holmes or Poirot adventure. I was going to post a nice picture to illustrate this story a bit but they are either spoilers or not very good, so no pics.

9. The Purloined Letter
Dupin is back! (and he barely just left)

“That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities." ” Burn! A story of a stolen important letter that can be used for blackmail purposes and destroy careers of public figures. It is not very fast-paced and Dupin is even more long-winded here. Excellent denouement, though. Clever stuff and quite entertaining, Dupin’s super long-winded expositions notwithstandiung.

The old "look over there!" trick from sneaky Dupin

Conan Doyle's tribute to Poe is Holmes dissing Dupin!†

10. A Descent into the Maelström
A stunningly boring tale of a whirlpool, it sucked me down its vortex and left me unconscious on my chair for at least 15 minutes. An excellent soporific.

In all fairness you may enjoy it, I just find an entire story based on a whirlpool very dull.

11. The Pit and the Pendulum
Our unnamed narrator finds himself—quite unexpectedly—in the clutches of the Spanish Inquisition.


OK, got that out of my system! Alas, no comfy chair for the poor fellow. More this sort of thing:

No sexy girlie to watch over him, though (damn Hollywood!)

A fantastic and very visceral story, beautifully constructed and the creepiness builds and builds. You can just about feel the pendulum’s blade swishing over your chest.

12. MS. Found in a Bottle
I thought it was going to be about a genie in a bottle, turned out to be a dull ghost ship story. How can a ghost ship story be dull? Poe was so versatile and talented he could do anything; including writing dull ghost ship stories.

13. The Premature Burial
A weird story about our unnamed narrator’s obsession with being buried alive by mistake. The narrative starts with Whathisname regaling the readers with documented cases of people being buried in error when they were still alive. The narrator suffers from a rare (of course) disorder that puts him into a state of death-like catalepsy. So his biggest fear is becoming cataleptic in places where he is not known, he imagines that he may one day wake up to find himself six feet under, struggling to get out.

(not a spoiler)
Great story!

14. William Wilson
A bizarre Twilight Zone-ish story. I did not like it to begin with, as Poe was rambling again earlier on, but I quickly changed my mind when weirdness ensues. A strange, possibly allegorical story of a doppelganger. Supernatural or psychological? Again, you decide! I tend to favor the supernatural explanation because that is the kind of guy I am!

15. Eleonora
A fable with an unexpected non-twist. WTF? LOL! Poe got me there, I find it kind of hilarious when I got to the end (not sure if that is the effect Poe has in mind).

16. Silence - A Fable
Mine eyes glazed over this story from beginning to end, and I can’t really tell you anything about it. Read my friend Glenn's erudite review of this story instead.

17. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
This is Poe’s only full length novel. I have not read it yet, I am sorry to say. I suspect Poe – like Lovecraft - is better in small doses. I may get around to it one day. You will be the first to know (well, top ten at least!)



As mentioned earlier Poe prose is sometimes hard to read, or even downright impenetrable. He often starts his stories with pages of rambling to set the scene to his stories. Fortunately, the stories often take wing after he is done setting the scene. Occasionally that does not happen and he just rambles on until the end.

At his best, his stories are fascinating and often horrifying. The images that his best stories conjure up are indelible in my mind. Better still, the very best ones can be read again and again; sometimes even immediately after having just read them. It is all too easy to miss details on the first read because his prose is often convoluted> However, rereading these stories often yields greater understanding and appreciation.


* He is a much better prose stylist then Lovecraft, though. Poe is naturally eloquent whereas I feel Lovecraft tries too hard and often end up with verbiage.

I have not reviewed the poems in this book because I have not yet read them (except The Raven, which is awesome). I don’t think I should attempt reviewing poems, I will leave that to my friend Cecily.

Spooky Quotes:
“It was not a groan of pain or of grief—oh, no!—it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe.”

“That perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

“He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower—is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.” (WTF?)

† External quote: Sherlock Holmes dissing Dupin:
“No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”
From  A Study In Scarlet

A collection of work by the illustrious deviant with the charming monogram E.A.P.
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Let me begin by trying to be helpful for anyone out there looking to pick up a copy of Poe’s work: do NOT settle for this edition, for a few more bucks you can get the Complete Poe (several available editions). If you’d rather settle for this half-assed collection and a KFC Meal Deal instead of Poe’s unabridged output, be my guest, odds are I’ll be the guy behind you in line getting the Extra Spicy Chicken Sandwich and toting a haggard copy of The Incomplete Writings of Chekov.
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So what does Bantam deliver in this collection? Seventeen stories (one being what the publisher calls Poe’s only Full Length Novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and another they describe as a Glorious Prose Poem “Silence-A Fable”) followed by sixteen poems.
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While I usually enjoy reading collections of stories, I’ve noticed that I have a hard time rating them, much less providing a sensible review. Fear not; these things have never stopped me before, and certainly aren’t going to today.
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The problem with providing a ‘rating’ or review on a collection (for me, at least) is that I’d prefer to rate each short story on its own merits and just be done with it. Of course, that would mean I’d be rambling on for thousands of characters for each short story, and nobody needs that. My biggest dilemma comes when I have to provide a single rating for the whole kit and caboodle, I start overanalyzing just what I’m attempting to do. Should I rate each story on a 1-to-5 scale and provide a Final Rating based on which was given most frequently? Should I take into consideration the percent of the total page count for each rating that was awarded and weigh it that way? These seem like practical things to do, but that would also entail employing what you might call mathematics, and if you think my writing is bad, you ought to have a look at my math skills, or lack thereof.
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So, I’m just going to start typing and see where that leads me. This ought to be good……
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“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” makes up the bulk of this book, and unfortunately, I think that this story sucks. I personally can’t confirm if this was Poe’s only novel-length work or not, but if it is, I can certainly see why he never went back to the novel. There were three things that I simply could not enjoy about Pym’s narrative, which I’ll try to tackle in order of their annoyance. Firstly, the story itself is just ass-bitingly boring; I didn’t find any of the events within exciting, for the most part, all they accomplished was allowing me to experience the tedium of 19th century sea travel; be it the initial drunken episode involving Arthur and his pal Augustus, Pym’s recounting his terror at being imprisoned within the belly of a boat during a mutiny, and finally, the completely grating voyage to the South Pole, which I can only compare to the latter half of Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (which I consider hella boring). Secondly, the abrupt end of the story doesn’t provide anything resembling a decent conclusion and managed to wrangle the honors for Worst Ending from “The Stand” (at least the rest of “The Stand” was entertaining, where the narrative of Pym advances sluggishly throughout). Lastly, narrator Pym breaks from the story on several occasions to discourse at length on subjects which usually have little or no involvement with the story whatsoever, be it his informative rambling about various methods of freight stowage, his mind-boggling dialog on penguin and albatross roosts, and his need to expound on the controversies surrounding the discover dates of miscellaneous islands. All of these are beyond boring, and none do anything to advance the story one bit and the story stagnates while the narrator goes on these worthless tangents. As a last complaint, I couldn’t help thinking Poe was trying to emulate or one-up “Candide” by having the protagonist suffer an unbelievable chain of misfortunes.
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I’ll quickly wrap up the other elements of the collection I didn’t enjoy. The poems did nothing for me, but I rarely enjoy poetry at all, so this wasn’t shocking and didn’t bother me much. I really couldn’t get into “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, especially since Lovecraft apparently ripped this story off and improved upon it. Both of Poe’s tales of love lost also failed to do anything for me, these being “Ligeia” and “Eleonora”. I can’t say that I took any pleasure in “Ms. Found in a Bottle” or the preposterous ‘prose poem’ “Silence-A Fable” either.
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Perhaps what I liked least about this edition was that the poems and weak novel-length comprised the second half of the book, a very poor way to conclude; it’s entirely up to the first 200 pages of the book to showcase Poe’s brilliance as a short-story writer.
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I personally found the highlights of the book to be the pair of stories involving the analytical mastermind C. Auguste Dupin, the stories included being “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”, both of which kick ass and left me wanting more of these stories (if anyone out there can provide information on whether or not Poe wrote more involving Dupin, please let me know). Other stories which I liked included “The Black Cat”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “William Wilson”, and perhaps my favorite story within was “The Cask of Amontillado”, which was also the only story which I found humorous.
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The rest of the collection was decent, including his more well-known shorts such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and “The Pit and the Pendulum”, none of which I enjoy as much as the stories mentioned just above. The other two stories within that I thought were only so-so were “A Descent into the Maelstrom” and “The Premature Burial.”
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One thing which I found rather bothersome throughout was how similar some of the stories were, making me question whether I’d even want to bother with the other half of Poe’s work, as his range seems stunted. “Maelstrom”, “Ms. Found in a Bottle” and the Pym narrative all involve some sort of nautical mishap (usually a boat being sucked into an abysmal whirlpool), I couldn’t tell you what the difference between “Ligeia” and “Eleonora” is, and the recurring subject of premature burial comes up in the Pym narrative, “Black Cat”, “Amontillado”, “Pit & Pendulum”, and (no doubt) “The Premature Burial”. While this isn���t necessarily a bad thing, for some of the duds in the collection I was left thinking “Didn’t I just read this?” If this is what the other half of Poe’s output is like, perhaps I’m better off with this edition and some of Colonel Sanders finest after all.

Never have I encountered such uncanny description of acute insanity from the inside out. [Case in point, the opening lines: "TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story."]

The tension mounts but along the way you'll surely identify with psychosis, sometimes unwittingly. A beautiful embodiment of the power of short story. Art truly mimics life.

The way he describes murder and the feelings that come afterwards is absolutely fabulous