by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Cask Of Amontillado.” A man takes cold, calculated revenge on a noble whom he perceives has insults him, walling the poor guy up in a catacomb. Very creepy, especially the part where he echoes the noble’s screams. [read three times]
"The Tell-Tale Heart.” A elderly man with a cloudy eye is murdered by (presumably) his caretaker. This reading really brought home how bat-shit insane the murderer is: he takes a full hour to put his head in the door. The themes of guilt and paranoia run deep here. Deservedly a classic. [read twice]
"The Fall of the House Of Usher.” A new Poe story to me. A man comes to visit a childhood friend, Roderick Usher, and finds him suffering from a possibly mental illness that makes him react in horror to most light and sounds. His twin sister is also suffering from catalepsy. She dies, and they entomb her in the house, but that’s when the really morbid stuff starts happening. This story is just pure Gothic horror. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of allegory or meaning here, just a portrait of supernatural fear (the house seems to be almost sentient). It’s written in an extremely lofty style, making it rather inaccessible to the casual reader, so it lacks the emotional punch of the previous two stories. Still, it’s a spooky tale.
"The Black Cat.” A man, once known for his kind disposition, is corrupted by drink and kills one of his pets, a cat. Disaster and murder follow, capped by an ending very similar to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” except with a more gruesome twist. Though this story isn’t narratively tight as the former, I found it just as compelling. It talks of the overpowering spirit of perverseness, doing “wrong for the wrong's sake only,” in all people. It mixture of the fantastic (the cat’s shadow on their burned house) and the mundane (drunken dissolution) is also appealing. Terrific and creepy as hell.
"Berenice.” Possibly the most pointlessly gory of Poe’s tales. A man suffering from spells of obsession on minor details becomes fixated on the teeth of his cousin, Berenice, who, though once athletic and merry, has succumbed to a degenerative disease. So he removes them while she’s still alive. Apparently, Poe himself said this story crossed the line of good taste.
“The Man Who Was All Used Up.” A rather humorous piece; the narrator meets a general famed for his bravery and is foiled at every turn when he tries to find out details. Finally, he goes to the general himself, only to find that scalping and the removing of limbs was only the start of what those savages did to him. Not brutally told, this is a light story, and it was amusing, thought he constant repetitions of the interlocutors grated after a bit.
four stars
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