Miscellaneous Stories Book

"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