Edgar Allan Poe in Six Stories

Edgar Allan Poe was a nineteenth-century American poet and writer known especially for horror and suspense. His Gothic fiction helped shape the modern mystery and detective story.

Today Poe is read as a foundational figure in American literature. In his own lifetime, money was often scarce and his personal life was troubled. The original review recounts that he received only nine dollars for The Raven, the poem that made him famous.

Finding Poe Through The Cask of Amontillado

The first Poe story I read was The Cask of Amontillado. Its premise, a man being walled in alive, made the Gothic terror feel terribly close. It left me wanting to read more, which led me to this collection.

Six Stories in One Volume

All six are short, and all found a way to keep me wondering how the next scene would unfold.

Some turn on reasoning and discovery. Others stay with dread. In the horror stories, Poe can make a room or a stretch of silence feel ominous well before anything happens.

The collection contains these six stories.

1. The Purloined Letter
2. The Gold-Bug
3. The Murders in the Rue Morgue
4. The Black Cat
5. The Fall of the House of Usher
6. The Masque of the Red Death

The first three foreground detection or the unraveling of a puzzle. The last three lean more heavily into horror.

The Black Cat

One of Poe’s best-known stories, The Black Cat makes human cruelty frighteningly immediate. Like The Cask of Amontillado, it uses the horror of being sealed behind a wall.

The chill lasts after the final page. It also leaves you thinking about the person who caused it. That is part of why Poe still matters: the most unsettling things in his horror can come from people themselves.

Book Information

Selected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

Author

Edgar Allan Poe

Korean edition publication date

3 March 2014

ISBN13

9788993785623

View book on YES24

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