No other writer evokes horror in its rawest, most human form like Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes his stories are a blunt force trauma while others are drilled into the mind using precision instruments of terror. His themes and depictions of people's greatest fears are very diverse and uniquely constructed, more visceral in some aspects but also cerebral in execution for a select few. This anthology The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings is comprised of his finest works in short story and poetry forms tackling what is readily terrifying, certain terrors that elude the psyche, and the unfortunate ways human beings transform into the very monsters they fear.

With seventeen gruesome tales and sixteen morbid poems, this anthology is a must-have for any aficionado of the genre. The prose that Poe crafts in each of his pieces is spellbinding; we get descriptive ramblings of mad men and women, psychologically layered instances and premonitions, and frightening yet subtle symbolisms plus debated interpretations of each work. Reading his short stories transport you right into the disturbed minds of irredeemable individuals who heed the call of misery and darkness, acting both predator and prey of their own machinations and failures.

His best pieces are those that make readers experience paranoia and dissociation themselves and such stories have become a classic for that very reason. The titular The Tell-Tale Heart is a brief yet searing account of a man haunted by his macabre misdeed while The Black Cat and The Cask of Armontillado have characters who commit murders for reasons somewhat hollow and petty; the former was discovered in the most absurd way possible while the other was successful in concealing it but is forever tainted after the fact. We also have allegorical pieces such as The Masque of Red Death, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and A Descent in the Maelstorm which evoke a series of unavoidable misfortunes, marking its characters in blood and death.

And then we have tales that have more non-conclusive interpretations and resolutions such as The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeria, The Pit and the Pendulumand The Premature Burial. All four of these stories are imaginative and insidious, dealing with fantastical elements and spine-tingling primitive fears that plague as all, only if we allow ourselves to contemplate deeper about them. A few other stories deal with catastrophic, life-altering conflicts which are found in Ms. Found in a Bottle and Silence--A Fable. And then we have the character-centric baffling accounts of William Wilson, Eleanora, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the last of which has the most trying length.

Before there was ever a more defined detective genre and its formulaic elements, Poe has created C. Auguste Dupin, the first crime reasoner who used deductive reasoning in solving criminal cases that later on inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his more famous great detective Sherlock Holmes. Dupin only appeared in two stories, The Murders in Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter which deserve multiple readings to be acquire a more nuanced appreciation for the groundwork and thought process that Poe has employed in characterizing his detective and resolving the plots.

After readers had their fill of his gripping short stories, they can move on to the assortment of his poems which offer a more economical way of slaking their interest and intrigue for the memorably horrific and sometimes even upsetting concepts regarding ailments and discord that people will always find themselves caught up in and often not overcoming. Poe's poetic style is refined and elegant in a lot of respects but there are moments of sporadic contemplations and truly intense retrospective epiphanies that will keep reeling readers in. I personally enjoyed Israfel, The City in the Sea, The Valley of the Unrest, The Sleeper, The Bells and Alone.

With a vigorous and daring marksmanship in which he penned his works with, Poe's prose is very much alive--rustling, palpitating, throbbing, moaning and groaning and every other vivid ways that may drive weaker minds mad upon reading. His tales are cavernous places, buried deep in the recesses of our minds we never fully acknowledge. But every so often we can hear them calling for us--like a bell tolling from a distance--or the low, persistent humming of a heartbeat; whether concealed in a crypt, lodged inside a bottle in the middle of an ocean or has made itself comfortable right under our very beds where we believe we are most safe when we really aren't.

RECOMMENDED: 9/10

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Poor Edgar, always so sad, but he sure can write a terrifying story. I wonder if it was the drugs he was on, of if this state of mind made him turn to the drugs. Either way he was a master of the macabre, and he always caught your attention.
I think this is where my fascination with this type of literature began.
No one wrote like Poe. No one left you hanging, literally, walled in, literally,and figuratively, like Poe. He could tap into our basest fear, anger and regret.make victims, beg for mercy, and yet understand why people did the terrible things they did. Some have even tried to copy his methods, years, decades, centuries after his untimely death.
His paranoia became ours. His terror was so well crafted that it has satyed with for a lifetime. We don't forget his stories. EVER!

Finally I can say I relate to when artic monkeys said
You got your H.P. Lovecraft
Your Edgar Allan Poe
You got your unkind of ravens
And your murder of crows
Catty eyelashes and your Dracula cape
Been flashing triple A passes
At the cemetery gates
'Cause you're so dark, babe

It is impossible to tell how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold, I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. 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.

My first time to read and finish a collection by Edgar Allan Poe and I was just blown away. This was one of my two Halloween reads this year and it made my long Halloween weekend truly worth remembering.

Here are my reactions to each of the 32 writings included in the book by Edgar Allan Poe.

n  n    STORIESn  n

1) The Tell-Tale Heart. 3 STARS
Quite scary. The narrator murders his or her (there is no pronoun used) master who has a "vulture-like" eyes. The narrator admits the crime at the beginning of his narration but what he or she is trying to prove is his or her sanity. EAP has the ability to vividly describe his milieu and draws you in immediately right from the first paragraph of the story.

2) The Black Cat. 4 STARS
I find this better-written and more complex than the first story. A man and his wife are fond of animals and they have a black cat named Pluto (Roman God of the underworld). They love the cat until the man becomes alcoholic. One evening, he plucks out the eye of the cat and hangs the poor animal by the tree. Critics say that this is the darkest among EAP's tales.

3) The Cask of Amontillado. 4 STARS
Very simple story yet it can send chills to your nerves. Just the mention of catacombs and niche in the kind of prose only EAP can write makes this reading truly apt for this season of Trick or Treats. The fact that there is no clear given reason why Montresor is leaving Fortunato alive inside the catacomb makes the story fresh and very inventive that is different from what I normally expect or demand from the contemporary crime novels.

4) The Fall of the House of Usher. 5 STARS
I was reading this late last night and I could not sleep because I got scared. The narration comes alive and the images are playing in my mind. Madeline, the sister, entombed alive by Roderick Usher, his brother. The gothic scenes: the castle, the lighting, the eerie song. Unbelievably scary! I have never read a novel (or a short story) that can keep you awake until it is really really time for you to sleep because it is 1am and you have work or school to attend to in a few hours.

5) The Masque of the Red Death. 4 STARS
A real treat but less scary. It seems to tell us the inevitability of death as symbolized by the many rooms and the different colors of the costume. The Red Death is like the Boogeyman who "gets" Prospero and his guests and as they fall or die one-by-one, it just mimics that happens in real life. EAP's prose is just exceptional. There is nothing like his play of words to impart the eerie but still really beautiful stories.

6) The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar. 4 STARS
Very interesting. The use of hypnosis to a dying man. At first, I did not know what was going on until I realized that the narrator was conducting an experiment by using magnetism to hypnotize Mr. Valdemar who kept on saying "I'm dying" or "Dead, dead, dead." I could not imagine this happening in real life. It is too unkind. But this is a Halloween read but if Madeline was entombed alive by her brother, this is nothing.

7) Ligeia. 3 STARS
Seems to me like a wishful thinking kind of story. When the man's first wife dies, he imagines the second one to be the reincarnation of the first. Opium was probably not prohibited during that time and it was even considered as an over-the-counter medicine so the grieving man who is taking care of his first wife drugs her for a painless death. The second half of the story seems like a hallucination.

8) The Murders in the Rue Morgue. 3 STARS
This one feels like a Sherlock Holmes short story rather than Edgar Allan Poe's. I have read the whole Holmes canon and I liked it but I prefer EAP to be himself and his forte is horror. There is a certain EAP touch on this though, the double murder is more gruesome than any of the Holmes'.

9) The Purloined Letter. 3 STARS
C. Aguste Dupin is back. Hay, it's good that the 3rd story, "The Mystery of Marie Ruget," is not in this collection. Again this story is a detective instead of a horror story. The story revolves around a stolen letter that is being used by the powerful thief to blackmail an influential woman in the society. The letter contains some juicy information about her. It is up to Dupin to bring the bribing thief into open by wearing a green Ray-Ban.

10) A Descent into the Maelstrom. 4 STARS
A story within a story and it is refreshing because it is not a horror story but a science fiction! I did not know that EAP wrote a sci-fi. I could imagine him writing a detective story because the movie "The Raven" starring John Cussack that I saw a couple of weeks back was really a detective story similar to those of Sherlock Holmes. Here in A Descent into the Maelstrom, there is a theory that the bigger or heavier body descends faster into the whirlpool. Also, this made me remember the instant graying of the hair when subjected to too much stress. I heard that story from my high school history teacher who was a fan of Edgar Allan Poe.

11) The Pit and the Pendulum. 4 STARS
Very much like the movie series "Saw." Or it even pales in comparison because in Saw, the prisoners have to saw off their limbs to have the chance to escape. However, this story should be credited for two things: Poe's narrative is just wonderful. The first half of the book focuses on the prisoner's fears in reaction to what he sees, feels and hears. The swinging of the pendulum producing swish-swish sound, the darkness, and the sight of the rats.

12) MS. Found in a Bottle. 3 STARS
This is said to be the story that launched Edgar Allan Poe's career. It won in a contest for short stories. It is about a man who survives a shipwreck and found a new one manned by an elderly crew. The survivor finds writing journal and egins writing a manuscript that he plans to toss into the sea afterwards.

13) The Premature Burial. 3 STARS
Like #2 "Amontillado" and #3 "Usher" above, this story is about a man getting buried alive. During Poe's time, public was fascinated about vampirism so dead people are buried right away as they might turn into vampires. This is a bit passe now considering that particularly here in the Philippines, wakes last from 3 or more days prior to interment.

14) William Wilson. 4 STARS
OMG. I heard this word "doppelgänger" from a teenager girl while nightswimming with her last Thursday, Nov 1st. When I heard that word, I asked what does it mean. She explained that it is having some kind of spirit mimicking you by looking and acting like you. I said, "wow, I learned something from a very young person like you."

15) Eleonora. 4 STARS
Said to be the story that EAP wrote to alleviate the guilt that he felt falling in love with another woman after his first wife died. What makes this short story different from the rest of his stories is that this is basically autobiographical and has an relatively happy ending.

16) Silence - A Fable. 4 STARS
A short piece, only a couple of pages long, it is more like a dream than a story with real characters. It is full of symbolism and rich imagery. Very deep, very intense. I'd like to know what Poe was thinking when he wrote this. Was he trippin?

n  n    NOVELn  n

17) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nuntucket. 4 STARS
The only novel in this collection. It involves shipwreck, mutiny and cannibalism. The narrator, Arthur Gordon Pym, is saved by Dirk Peters and the narrative continues when they land but get into conflict with black native men. They go back to the sea and the narrative ends while they are heading to the South Pole. This novel is partly adventure, partly sci-fi, party travelogue, partly gruesome and macabre. I liked the first-person narrative. That distinct voice that only EAP has is very evident and enjoyable when he is using first-person narrator. It feels creepy and classy. I enjoyed his better than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. Also, this is said to have inspired the works of Herman Melville and Jules Verne.

n  n    POEMSn  n

18) Stanzas. 4 STARS
The power of the moonlight. The mystic energy that comes from the sun. I remember a Tagalog song from my childhood that is a song about the moon: "O maliwanag na buwan / Nakikiusap ako / Ang aking minamahal / Sana ay hanapin mo. // Tadhana ma'y magbiro / Araw man ay magdaan / Ang pagibig ko sa kanya / Ay hindi magbabago / Magpakaylan pa man."

19) Romance. 4 STARS
A poem about looking back (first stanza) and regret (second stanza). The narrator used to love romance that he compares to a bird: "to lisp my very earliest word" and I also remembered that when I was a young man, I just lie down on the grass covered earth and think about the future. Now, I don't have time for that anymore akin to the feeling of the narrator: "I have no time for idle cares" and so he regrets the lost of his younger years.

20) To Helen. 4 STARS
An obvious reference to Helen of Troy because of the use of classical beauty: "Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face." This poem is EAP's tribute to female beauty similar to Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Beautiful Nude" where Neruda describes the nude female body. I enjoy this kind of poem because poetry itself is like a female body, it is smooth, soft and invigorating to the senses.

21) Israfel. 4 STARS
Quite different from the other poems and works of EAP. This is cheery, positive and inspiring. The title comes from the Islam angel Israfel who will show up during the Second Coming playing the trumpet. She plays very well so everyone will be looking and hearing her every note. Nice to read something not only different from most of the works in this collection but also appreciate EAP when he talks about angels rather than demons or supernatural beings.

22) The City in the Sea. 3 STARS
This is what I am saying in #21. This poem is the classic usual EAP. I mean this is gothic through and through. It talks about a city that is ruled by demons. The city is by the sea and it is in the west of it and when that is the scenario, the city is said to be doomed. It is good that Manila is in the east although it is surrounded by China Sea and Pacific Ocean. Hmmm.

23) The Sleeper. 4 STARS
EAP proudly claimed that this his is best poem. Better than "The Raven." It is about the death of a lovely woman and goes with the woman is his love. A melancholy and painful poem to read but nevertheless very beautiful.

24) The Valley of Unrest. 3 STARS
The speaker in the poem asks if all lovely things are far away. It mentions (again) a woman called "Helen" that according to critics was Jane Stannard, EAP's first love and the mother of a friend. It also talks about the valley that is partly Satan, angel and also a large part broken heart. This is another sad poem in this collection.

25) Lenore. 4 STARS
Unlike #23, #24 and his other works with dying or dead beautiful woman, in this poem, EAP talks about the possibility of meeting the woman in paradise (after life). Here the Lenore's (the dead woman) fiance, Guy de Vere, says that they should not be sad because she will soon be very happy with the angels in heaven.

26) The Raven. 5 STARS
The best (so far) poem in this collection. It is many things to me: it is painful and sad (the speaker is lamenting the lost of his love Lenore - see #25) yet it is musical and not really gloomy, overall. The verses are playful and you can imagine the raven flying in the air, through the window, and settling on the statue. The raven also talks - it keeps on saying "Nevermore" - and it adds to the childlike playful prose. It is sad yet it is happy (in a way). However, the playful scene ends when the speaker begins to talk to the raven while sitting on the statue of Pallas. He asks if he is to be reunited with Lenore and when the raven says "Nevermore," he gets angry and the feeling of doom dawns on the poem.

27) A Valentine. 5 STARS
EAP is a women's guy. His writings are mostly about death, life, love and...women! In this poem, you can find the name of his girl, Frances Sargent Osgood. To find the name, take the first letter of the first line, then the second letter of the second line, then the third letter of the third line, and so on. (Source: Wiki). I did see it! Very clever.

28) Ulalume - A Ballad. 5 STARS
Almost put tears to my eyes while reading. This is similar to the other works of EAP that talk about a death of a woman he loves. Just how many deaths did EAP experience in his life? I know his wife died and he remarried. But I guess even the loss of his many girlfriends (he was a playboy, wasn't he?) became like death to himself. The setting of this poem is by the lake on a moonlit night and with tears in his eyes, he stumbles the grave of his loved one, Ulalume. Very sad.

29) For Annie. 5 STARS
A dying man gives thanks that his "lingering illness," life, is finally over. He is now beyond pain and suffering. But no one, he says, should think pityingly of him. After all, everyone will lie in the same bed he does. Moreover, his death is not final. As his lover, Annie, looks on him and cries because she thinks he is dead, he declares that his heart and his thoughts are more alive than ever, for they are filled with the sight of Annie's love. Though dead, he lives on because of her love. Is there any other poem sadder than this?

30) Annabel Lee. 5 STARS
This is the only poem of EAP that I still remember reading during my school days (not sure whether in elementary or high school). This poem is very romantic compared to the dark gloomy ones that he wrote particularly #28 and #29 above. This talks about him missing his beautiful woman named of course, Annabel Lee while he is in his room (unlike #28 that has a setting by the lake). Short and sweet yet of course sad. If I will be asked to choose one poem by him, now I do not know which one to choose: this or "The Raven."

31) The Bells. 4 STARS
What amazed me here is the use of the word "bells" to mimic the actual sound when a bell rings. The repeated use of that word: bells, bells, bells, bells,... in the lines just did not remind me of the ringing of bells but also what those ringings signify to us in different points in our lives. When I was baptized, for example, the church bells rang. When I got married, they also rang. When I will die, they will also ring for the last time. These different stages in man's life is also captured in the use of the bells from the start to the end of the poem. The mood becomes gloomier and gloomier.

32) Alone. 4 STARS
Simply beautiful. It tells us that no matter what we went through in life, we will always end up by ourselves. Alone. We were born to this earth alone (unless you a twin) and we will all die alone (unless you die with a mass of people like in a battle or a catastrophe). What a nice poem to cap this beautiful beautiful collection.

I think I prefer Edgar Allan Poe as a poet rather than a short story writer or a novelist. However, I rarely read poems so maybe that's the reason why I particularly enjoyed very much the poems in this collection. I had no expectations about his poems prior to this.

This book made my Halloween this year truly memorable. Priceless read.

"Fear of being buried alive is the fear of being placed in a grave while still alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. The abnormal, psychopathological version of this fear is referred to as taphophobia (from Greek τάφος - taphos, "grave, tomb" and φόβος - phobos, "fear"), which is translated as "fear of graves".

Before the advent of modern medicine, the fear was not entirely irrational. Throughout history, there have been numerous cases of people being buried alive by accident. In 1905, the English reformer William Tebb collected accounts of premature burial. He found 219 cases of near live burial, 149 actual live burials, 10 cases of live dissection and 2 cases of awakening while being embalmed."

Thank you, Wikipedia! That pretty much sums up my E.A.P. reading experience.

VERY creepy! We were forced to read it in English... AHH!!!

I absolutely love this short story, it does things to me as most of Poe's works seem to, to strike something exciting inside my mind. I think this is one of the better known of Poe's works, something like The Raven or The Pit and the Pendulum. Poe does a very good job of making you invested in the characters and the plot in a very short amount of time, as always, and gets your heart rising at the apex, which quickly falls to a satisfying insanity.
The man from whose perspective the story is told is obsessed with an old man, or rather, his eye. It haunts him, he needs it gone. He plots to kill the old man, and it's in this portion that the tension rises as he slowly prowls in on the man with a lamp. He kills the man and hides him beneath the floorboards just in time as the police come at the request of a neighbor who heard the old man cry out. The man is seemingly getting away with his crime, he is smug watching them standing unsuspectingly over the body; that is, until his conscience starts getting the better of him.
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It drives him to hear the beating heart, like the sound of a watch beneath layers of cotton, through the floorboards. The policemen look unaware, though he's sure it's just a ploy, he knows they can hear it. The heart beats louder and louder, and he can't hear himself think over the incessant beating, which eventually leads him to confess everything in a screaming rage; the entire work holds a tone of insanity, bringing the feeling throughout so you can gain the tension more perfectly. Once again, a masterpiece from Sir Edgar.

I love me some Poe. Not sure if I could stomach a re-read at this point, but I may try.

The Greatest 25 Short Stories of All Time According to Forbes - #2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertai...

Plus, I feel a bit guilty about not reading Annabel Lee after it was featured so prominently in Lolita by Nabokov.

When I was in high school, I was obsessed with this story. I'm afraid I still quote it with dramatic gestures.

he would have ran creepypasta like the army