1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
His horrible heart, August 30, 2010
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 "Selected Tales " brings together some of his best-known and most influential stories.
Poe's fiction writings include short stories and novellas, which tend to be rather weird -- a treasure-hunt and a golden insect, a man who loses his love in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, and stories of despair, madness, and occasionally beauty. There is also his trilogy of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin stories, which were the first to feature a brilliant detective solving an impossible crime.
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, a woman returned from death, a murderer haunted by the heartbeat of his victim, and a ghastly house with its doomed inhabitants.
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 quiet words seem utterly chilling ("But the echoes of the chime die away... and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart"). 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.
Poe's "Selected Tales " is a must-have for anyone with an appreciation for great literature and beautiful, dark writing -- and a good place for newbies to start.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sickening brilliance., January 26, 2000
I used to loathe Poe's style, whose involutions seemed to drain his work of all their professed horror, while admiring the way he smuggled hugely complex ideas into popular modes - no wonder Hitchcock adored him. Now, as I grow older, I begin to value Poe more, recognise his obsessions and fears in myself, while marvelling at a style that manages to convey hothouse exoticism with remarkable, chilling precision.
Of the three stories I read recently in this volume, Morella is the least successful, a rehash of Leonora (a dead wife is reincarnated in her daughter), but there a brilliance in Poe's dramatising of an idea that is admirable.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is truly disgusting and horrifying. A hynotist experiments on a dying man to see if he can prolong life after death. The cool analytic style lead contemporaries to confuse it with a medical testcase (it was published in a scientific journal), but what is most memorable is the anguish of the dead man who cannot rest.
Best of all though is the immortal Black Cat. Violent and unconsionable, the brutalities in this story are among the most grotesque in literature, both to animals and to people. Poe's style is at his most poetically sustained as he describes the most vile barbarities with his character's objectionable self-pity. What is most sublime, though, is the note of black comedy that is laced throughout, which would be foregrounded in Roger Corman's hilarious version in Tales Of Terror.
Van Leer's introduction is informative enough, but there is a note of begrudgery and a refusal to take Poe altogether seriously, that is aggravating.
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