Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is a tremendous author. I personally do not read much horror but I enjoy Poe’s adaption of it. The Black Cat is a great story about a man who talks about his honor and sanity, but then ends the story by killing his wife and trying to hide her body inside of a wall. He would have gotten away with it too if it were not for his cat who was also behind the wall. It’s an ironic story as the narrator claims to love animals, but it is his rage against that cat that made him kill his wife, and then the cat who got him arrested.

The Fall of the House of Usher is a true gothic tale, it contains an old withering mansion, a bleak landscape, and death. One thing I really like about the story is the description of the setting, Poe truly paints a real image in my head of what the house looks like. The story in itself is spooky as they come too, burring someone, mysterious fog, noises coinciding with a story, the person you burry ends up not being dead and comes back for revenge, and the house crumbling to the ground. All together that’s one good gothic tale.  

The Tell-Tale Heart has many parallels to The Black Cat, they both are about a narrator who claim they are a good person, but end up killing someone. In Tell-Tale Heart though, the narrator confesses to his crime thinking that the police can hear the heartbeat of the blued eyed man he had killed. Both stories though have a death, followed by a successful hiding of the body and good poise with the police while showing them around, but end up getting caught anyway, both by a sound from where the body was hidden.