“The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)

The thing to remember about Edgar Allan Poe is that he was both versatile and original. Arguably he invented the detective story and more than one category of horror, with time left over for poetry, and he was only 40 when he died. In this very short story, one of his most famous, Poe is working with a mysterious unnamed first-person narrator who is both unreliable and, like the narrator of F. Marion Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” quite evidently a hysterical madman. Recognizing its classic qualities, the story’s language is slightly on the wrong side of archaic for me. It seems intended to be read aloud, and has been hundreds if not thousands of times. Possibly it’s the best way to experience the story. It lumbers a bit, but it doesn’t shrink from shock effects—notably the dismemberment of a body, but also shaming an old man’s filmy eye as grotesque enough to warrant death. And then the whole story turns and in tone it becomes closer to drawing-room tale, looking forward to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and focusing on a police interview, where basically our narrator jousts with them but can’t keep his existential cool. Famously, he believes he begins to hear the dismembered man’s heart still beating from its hiding place under the floorboards. And it’s getting louder. We can’t know for sure at first whether he is blowing it with the police, but it’s a riot going on in his head: “I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations, but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone?” The story may be itself pitched in too high of a key for me, but there is Raskolnikov believing he is a superman, not mad but superior, and that’s the main point here, the willfulness and confidence he is above it all. But it’s also a classic for Halloween, working the psychology of the unconscious sense of guilt that motivates behavior, looking forward to Freud as well as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Good job! “The Tell-Tale Heart” is so influential you could practically reverse-engineer it out of a whole sector of stories and novels.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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