“The Black Cat” (1843)

[spoilers, content warnings] This Edgar Allan Poe story is an absolute classic on a few different levels. It has Poe’s claustrophobic neuroses on full display. Walling things up may have worked better in “The Cask of Amontillado” but it’s fine here too. Certain paranoid parallels are also obvious with another famous story of his from the same year, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” And layering on folk superstitions around black cats and/or their wicked supernatural powers basically makes it a wind-up-and-go winner. But my favorite part is the way those elements are not the greatest horror in this story. That belongs to the first-person narrator, an unrepentant abusing monster. He’s what’s most scary in this story, not the business with the cat and the revenge. Poe obviously knows what his narrator is and plays to it. The misdirection from the self-pitying narrator is chillingly easy to see through. That he cannot see it himself makes him even worse. He’s about to be put to death as he writes—and we know it’s the only thing that’s going to stop him. He is a drunkard as well, which exacerbates his abuse, which is shocking. He is married and though they had no children they were happy tending to a small menagerie: “birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.” But when our guy drinks he can get mean and in one such fit he tears one of the cat’s eyes out. It’s hard to express how shocking this is. The cat survives and stays with them, but now he's fearful and not so friendly. I know using pets in stories like this is blatantly manipulative and even a crutch for writers, but they can still work on me, and I think Poe knows what he’s doing here. It gets worse. Now our guy can’t stand the sight of the cat and in another fit solves that problem by hanging it from a tree limb. After which his house burns down and a mysterious scorch mark appears in the little that survived, a scorch mark that looks like a cat with a rope about its neck. Unbelievably, it continues. He murders his wife in yet another fit of rage and thinks he can get away with it by walling the corpse up next to the fireplace in the basement. However, in his haste, he walls up another cat in the household, which was black like the previous cat and showed up shortly after that demise of the first. Hmm. When police show up investigating his missing wife, the walled-up cat raises a ruckus and the corpse is soon discovered. Yes, there are lots of unlikely aspects here, but Poe’s overheated tone and the rapid-fire series of events get us past all questions, even if in a slightly numb state from some of the shocks. I went to ISFDB and rated it 10 out of 10.

65 Great Tales of Horror, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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