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Poe: Selected Tales

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I've always had a liking for Edgar Allan Poe, with his tales of horror, mystery and suspense, done in the atmospheric prose of a master writer. Since I live close enough, I've even made some trips to his gravesite, a place that is always surrounded by a sense of sadness.

Poe was a tormented genius who died young, under mysterious circumstances, and at the time of his death he wasn't deservingly popular. Certainly his work was not cute romances for the masses -- he explored the darkness of the human heart, love, satire, and the earliest whodunnit stories. And "Poe: Selected Tales" brings together some of his most memorable fiction here.

Poe's fiction writings include short stories and novellas, which include plenty of despair, madness, and occasionally beauty. This includes two of his Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin stories, which were the first to feature a brilliant detective solving an impossible crime, and there's also the novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," an increasingly weird tale of a boy's adventures at sea.

And, of course, the horror. This is what Poe is best known for, including such well-known stories as "The Fall Of The House Of Usher." But there are also lesser-known gems -- tales of a plague invading a party, being buried alive, the sound of a beating heart that drives a man mad, a court jester's revenge, a woman strong enough to defy death, a demonic horse and a feud, a man haunted by a doppelganger, and more.

Don't read too many of Poe's stories all at once. It's too intense. It's better to soak it in a little at a time, so that you can get a better feel for the different kinds of writing that Poe did, and how he excelled at pretty much everything he put down on paper. Most great writers can't boast of that much.

Poe's writing is what makes even his least story or poem come alive -- he brought a gothic, misty vibrancy to his stories, and could make his words seem utterly chilling ("mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood"). It's not hard to see why he was an influence on authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and Franz Kafka.

The only problem is that, well, this is a SELECTION of Poe's stories, so of course some brilliant material is going to be left out (including one of the Dupin stories -- we have stories #1 and #2, but not #3).

"Poe: Selected Tales" brings together some of Poe's best work, both obscure and famous. While true Poephiles will want the whole package, this is a good way of being introduced to his writing.