Customer Reviews

Tales of Mystery and Imagination

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had read some of Mr. Poe's tales at different times during the course of my life, but I had never before sat down to read all of his most important ones before I picked up this book. I found this an incredible thing to do, because I was faced with the genius that was Poe. Most of us know that he was the father of the short story genre, and that many famous authors (not the least of which were Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie) tried to follow in his footsteps. This is an almost impossible task because the genius of Poe was his poet's nature which allowed him to write very beautiful prose too. He also had the gift of mixing his impalpable shadows of mystery which run through all his tales with an almost obsessive attention to detail. This brought his stories to life when he wrote them, and this power still brings them to life today. It is difficult to pick a favourite tale out of so many gems, but I'd have to go with "The Black Cat", I think. In this tale Poe's protagonist allows a very intimate glimpse of the darkest recesses of his souls, and we descend into madness with him. This is an eerily beautiful world here and not for the faint of heart.

I felt chilled reading this collection of Poe's all time best stories. I especially loved the eerieness of The Cask of Amontialldo and the insanity of the narrator in the The Balck Cat, all so frightly believable. The illustrations top it off by adding a magical touch of frightful imagery to the collection.

Having never read Edgar Allen Poe I was quite pleased with his writing. One of my favorite stories out of the plethera of choices was the Gold Bug. At first I was relucant to continue with the book. It was going slow and was hard to interpret. Then in the middle of the story it picked up pace and had some mystery and magic in it. I became fixed with reading it and figuring out how they found the treasure and how it was all possible. The process of the way the treasure was found was fantastic. This book has many of Poe's greatest writings. And that is what made it great. You didn't ahve to get a lot of books to read many of his stories, you could simply just get one and read many. This book contained many great short stories. It is a must read.

It's an expensive book with only THREE stories from the whole of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. From the title and reviews I thought I'm getting the whole book, with illustrations only for three of the stories. That aside, the illustrations are great! Unfortunately, the reading text is also set in the ornate typography used for the title. While it works very well used as display typography - for titles, chapter headings, etc., this typeface is very unsuitable for reading as text. The book jacket is also slightly yellow around the edges, with a bit of the lamination peeling off. (Guess it's a very old stock. I've got a replacement from Amazon and both books are the same.)

I read this book about a year ago and loved it. I'm the type of person who reads before they go to sleep and I had to put this book down because it was so frightening. I loved the way Poe drew me into the story and kept me begging for more. I was always curious to know what happened next, even if I was terrified. My favorite of all the stories was the "Cask of Amontillado". It was so creative how you became almost like a part of the story.