“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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“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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