“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 Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)

[spoilers] I have to admit Edgar Allan Poe can be a chore for me and here is a sterling example. The action, such as it is, is molecular, the language is dense and requires parsing—practically every sentence in every brick-wall monolith paragraph. Not much in this story makes sense except perhaps as some fever dream of the afterlife. Editor David G. Hartwell in The Dark Descent anthology sees the story as a foundational transition from haunted castle to haunted house, but that’s splitting hairs pretty fine considering this house feels like a castle or at least a mansion. The Ushers live in it, a brother and sister. Maybe I should use the scare quotes, “live” in it. The narrator was college chums with the brother. The chum has come in response to a strange, unexpected, and urgent letter from him. The sister is dying of disease unspecified, and in fact dies while the narrator is there. The narrator and brother transfer the body to some room in the basement. This being a Poe story, it’s little surprise that she is not actually dead but buried prematurely. Furthermore, the brother kinda sorta knew it (parsing the murk) when he enlisted the help interring her. The brother and narrator otherwise appear to spend most of their time reading aloud to one another from great works of fantasy (in the name-checking paragraph I recognized one of them, and suspect they’re all real) or reciting poetry and singing songs while whaling on a guitar. I should have stuck with that Netflix series a little longer to see how they treated these scenes but I was already struggling with the TV gloss. The story itself erupts into a poem of six stanzas at one point. Then the sister escapes her entombment and shows up just in time to die with her brother. The narrator discreetly departs the premises, at which point the house cracks in half and sinks into the lake it was built on. This is all accompanied by extensive excerpts from a fictional Romance tale involving Ethelred the knight. It’s no wonder Hammer Films (and Netflix) felt like they could do whatever they wanted with some of these stories (“The Pit and the Pendulum” another great example). I might have liked “Usher” more on previous readings, but not lately. It’s ridiculously extravagant with the collapsing house. Nothing with the sister makes sense. We find out later they are twins but that is not particularly helpful. It’s not like one of them ate the other in the womb. Yes, it is admirably thick with a good mood of dread and gothic atmosphere but that is almost all it is. Trade-offs: it can also be boring and impossible to believe. The language takes considerable getting used to and was slow, slow going for me. I do get a kick out of Poe’s obsession with premature burial. It shows up a lot in his stuff, like Mr. Mxyzptlk in the Superman comics. Me, my policy is not to think about being buried alive. Not always easy, I must admit.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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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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"The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)

This short Edgar Allan Poe story reads remarkably well during a pandemic. The disease in this case (or pestilence, or plague) is called the Red Death—purely invented and grotesque, bringing certain death. It's plausible in many ways, less so in others. It raises the blood to the surface of the skin and flushes it forth, as if capillary walls are dissolved. Its course from onset to death is absurdly swift, about 30 minutes. But he's got much more right than wrong here, notably on contagion and, especially, the behavior of the privileged. In the face of plague our hero, such as he is, one Prince Prospero, retires to his remote hideaway with a thousand of his best friends. The bet is herd immunity. It's not really social distancing in the castle but more like the super rich today with their private islands, sending out for test kits to ensure their own safety in the meanwhile. In this case the prince bolts and then welds the doors shut behind him. Minneapolis is burning. No one is getting in or out for the duration. The rest is quite familiar: "The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine." Quarantine party time! And the revels go on 24/7, with food and bored entertainment. Poe wrote horror more with a European twang than American, which to me is his enduring strength, setting many of his stories on the continent and featuring the native aristocracy. Prince Prospero is a nobleman and he acts like one. Think Jared Kushner. Comes the day, some five or six months into the lockdown, when the prince decides to give a masquerade ball. At this point, even though the story is quite short, Poe branches off into one of his description fugues about rooms and suites and color schemes. It's a bit confusing, with corridors and windows and ultimately seven rooms done up in seven colors. It's kind of like a rainbow except the colors are wrong and in the wrong sequence. Red is the death chamber, of course, and its opposite here is blue, which does happen to have uncanny resonance with our present historical moment, right down to a contagious epidemic and the color red representing the death cult. Poe was thinking of blood, of course (as opposed to blood and soil), but by both happy accident and instinctive understanding of epidemic he turned out a remarkable story in spite of the small miscues. I know it's purely circumstantial and maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it feels like it was written for COVID-19 in the 21st century. For that reason, I'm sorry to have to report that the virus wins. Even in a remote mountain keep, you can't get away from it. Spoiler alert.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

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"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)

The first time I read this unpleasant story by Edgar Allan Poe was in a collection my parents gave me for my 12th birthday, along with the Beatles album Rubber Soul. I wrote about it here when I wrote about the album. Later I tracked down the book and found out the only thing I remembered right was it had "The Yellow Wallpaper" and a story by Poe—this story. The collection is called These Will Chill You, edited by Richard G. Sheehan and Lee Wright, who went on to little else. Most of the stories are about as unpleasant as the cover, above. As for Poe, I had previously trudged through "The Purloined Letter" as a kid, but in both cases I was hampered by the archaic language. "The Cask of Amontillado" may be Poe's best for horror generally, at least the way I see it, but his version of body horror here (and in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" and no doubt elsewhere), is about as bracing as it is prescient. Wikipedia dryly lists Poe's enduring themes as "questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning."

I like the motivating concept of this arguably science fiction story, with hypnotism temporarily capable of arresting the death process, but I like even more how it was a bit of a prank. It was published in two New York City papers simultaneously with its clinical-sounding title and no indication it's fiction. Apparently people believed it. Maybe they still do, in their coffins with their undying minds. Our hero, M. Valdemar, is dying of tuberculosis and agrees to allow the unnamed first-person narrator, a mesmerist and scientist, to hypnotize him exactly at the moment of death. Through the magic of telling it just this way they manage the unlikely feat. Death appears to steal over Valdemar, his color changes, no breath can be detected. The narrator asks him if he is still asleep and, in a real scary voice, Valdemar says, "Yes; – no; – I have been sleeping – and now – now – I am dead." Leaving him in trance is deemed the prudent course. And so there he lays, with no sign of life yet no sign either of the decomposition of death, for seven months. They check on him regularly but leave him be. Then they decide to wake him, ignoring the advice of Ernst Raupach in Germany, author of the 1823 vampire story "Wake Not the Dead." Result (spoiler): "Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity." THE END Janitor!

There is always a certain desolation when it comes to body decomposition even when it's roadkill. It's distressing and repulsive. It's generally kept out of sight except in most horror movies, which prominently feature it (it's the main visual detail of zombie movies, for example). I don't have the impression Poe injects it in places like this just for macabre effect. It feels more like these things actually horrify him in obsessive ways and he can't stop thinking about them. It reminds me of someone I knew who had an absolute horror of organ transplants. This person took legal steps to ensure that neither a donor nor a recipient would they ever be. The belief was evidently that the self, or soul, literally resides in the body, and discrete pieces of it are distributed in the organs. No word on the limbs. The pantheistic vision of Poe's "Colloquy" similarly sees consciousness (or self, or soul) retained in the body, eventually displaced with decomposition and dispersed into the landscape itself. No word on cremation. In "M. Valdemar" the mind—or something—can hold off putrefaction if the subject is kept in a hypnotic state. Body horror seems right, and quite an early example too. And you have to wonder what the poor guy was thinking about for seven months—there's the real horror.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)

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"The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841)

This story by Edgar Allan Poe is at least as difficult as it is strange. Every time I go back to it I find myself losing attention for most of the first half. It's formally presented as a dialogue between two spirits in the afterlife who were lovers or married when they were alive. Monos (Greek masculine form of "one") was the first to die, apparently—he has memories of Una (Latin feminine form of "one") grieving at his funeral ceremonies. Now he seems to be explaining the afterlife to her. Perhaps she has just died. If it's classified as a horror story, and I'm not sure it should be, that's chiefly for two reasons: 1) it was written by Poe, and 2) its vision of the afterlife is bound to be disturbing to many as a version of being buried alive (a familiar Poe motif). I'm not 100% comfortable myself with his vision yet I find it somehow more soothing than unsettling, even exhilarating in a way. To be honest I'm not even sure I'm getting it right. The introduction to the online version I found, for example, characterizes this piece as "Conversations between two Athenians who have experienced life and death several times. They are frustrated because mankind never seems to learn from the past." Actually I'm not at all sure that's it, but given the business model of the website—"a 'G' rated study resource for junior high, high school, college students, teachers and home schoolers"—it may be they don't want to fly right at this one.

As I say, it's not easy to make out. The story is outfitted with multiple foreign languages, including Greek rendered in the Greek alphabet (hence "Athenians," I presume, though I believe Una would then have to be more like Roman). The dialogue between Monos and Una is not easy to follow even when it's in English. It's actually, title notwithstanding, more of a soliloquy by Monos, who can't quite figure out how to say what he wants to say. "Words are vague things," he says in one of the most straightforward declarative sentences in the whole thing. "[A]fter some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor; and this was termed Death by those who stood around me.... I was not unconscious of those movements which displaced you from me, which confined me within the coffin, which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave, which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mould upon me, and which there left me, in blackness and corruption, to my sad and solemn slumbers with the worm." Though this last passage is very close to the end of the story, there's still a good deal more to be revealed by Monos in the last three paragraphs, which it might be fair to call epic revelations, come thou now and hear the word. Certainly this section works on me that way. This is the part of the story that thrills me, which has even led me to inflict it on others in informal reading discussion groups and now to make a home for it in these contemplations of horror short stories. Asking others to look at it is always when I'm suddenly reminded how strange and how difficult the story is, whether or not you call it horror. I don't even know Poe well enough to understand what kind of a story it is for him (it seems a departure from everything else I've read) or how much of an anomaly it might be. But the thing practically floors me every time, extolling its oxymoronic balm of death's sting.

Read story online. (Library of America)

"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)

Read story by Edgar Allan Poe online.

Edgar Allan Poe's dank tale of revenge, murder, and appalling cruelty is just about the perfect short story—a dark horror play with a twist ending and all elements laid in to support it. I'm about to give it away any minute so go read it if you haven't because of course that's where it is told best. In Italy, during carnival time, the first-person narrator Montresor lures a friend he has come to despise down to the wine cellar of his palazzo, offering to share a very good new wine he says he has acquired at a good price, an amontillado. Montresor's friend, Fortunato (O irony), is already half-drunk from the revels, wearing a jester's costume. The story, though it is dark and cruel, is also funny in many ways. Montresor's rage about Fortunato's unspecified "thousand injuries" and "insult," with his description of the rules for administering revenge, are as comical as they are mad. At one point, Fortunato challenges Montresor's claim to belong to the masons by asking him for the secret sign. Montresor reaches into his cloak and produces a trowel. On first reading, we don't know the significance of this any more than Fortunato and the gesture is more strange than explanatory. Later, when we know better, it is somehow even more funny—something about the mystique of the masons, perhaps, juxtaposed with the homely construction tool, momentarily like a scene from Laurel and Hardy. The setting in the catacombs of a palazzo is perfect—evocative of the 19th-century American view of Europe as a moldering graveyard, decaying and debased. Montresor's crime is impossibly perfect. He plays Fortunato with precision, luring him deeper and deeper into the catacombs. "A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser," Montrosor notes early, later confirming that his crime is still unpunished after 50 years. In fact, it's all a bit too perfect. It might just be an impotent daydream after all. But it's a remarkable feat indeed to lull us as readers enough that we take sympathetic satisfaction from the crime as it goes down, relishing the pleasure of it with Montresor, though we have no idea what Fortunato did to deserve it. We see some ambiguous, potentially dismissive attitude by Fortunato toward Montresor, but not much. Mostly we are caught up in the seething rage and clinical precision of Montresor's monstrous deed. "[The wrong] is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong," Montresor also mentions as preface, and later he sees to that as well. Fortunato knows what is happening to him and, most importantly, by whom. "The Cask of Amontillado" might even be better than some of the revenge fantasies I've played in my own head. Don't miss those jingling bells on Fortunato's carnival cap.

"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe (Library of America)