Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
112. Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Thorndike Large Print Edition
This anthology of Poe stories contains many of his most famous stories, as well as a number of lesser-known tales. I read the Thorndike Large Print Edition (since it was the only one available at my library), which Includes the following: “The Assignation”; “Ligeia”; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “The Man of the Crowd”; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”; “Never Bet the Devil Your Head. A Tale with a Moral”; “The Masque of the Red Death”; “The Pit and the Pendulum”; “The Tell-Tale Heart”; “The Black Cat”; “The Premature Burial”; “The Purloined Letter”; “The Imp of the Perverse”; “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether”; “The Sphinx”; and “The Cask of Amontillado.”
These stories, as you might expect, all deal with horrors such as ghosts, demons, torture chambers, murders, and madmen. Most of them seemed to have no point other than to shock and frighten their audience, and many of them succeeded in being truly creepy. Some of my favorite stories were “The Masque of the Red Death” (in which a medieval-esque castle is terrorized by a plague), “The Cask of Amontillado” (a man buries his nemesis alive), and “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” (a traveler visits an insane asylum). I also really enjoyed the stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin, mostly because the plots were so intricate as to defy belief. It’s fun to compare them to the Sherlock Holmes stories! I would recommend these stories to anyone looking for some good old-fashioned gothic horror.