I was pretty dismissive of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher‘ last month, but I thought I would give Poe a second chance. This is a collection of his shorter stories including:

a) The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is best known for developing the template for the modern detective story. Two women are brutally murdered in a classic locked room mystery. Numerous witnesses overhear what they believe to be the murderers. An amateur detective, Monsieur Dupin, investigates, accompanied and narrated by a faithful sidekick on hand to record his powers of deduction. The mystery has a farcical and preposterous solution involving an orang-utang, but the features of the detective fiction, including the demonstration of analytical powers before the main crime occurs, the incompetent and bumbling police, deductive analytical processes, even the habit of remaining secluded when not on a case, they are all there. Conan Doyle acknowledges as much by explicitly referencing Dupin in an early Holmes story. This tale is full of holes – the room in which the deaths occur just happens to have a window with a secret catch allowing it to open undetected, for reasons never clearly explained, and the introduction of an orang-utang as the mystery killer made me laugh out loud.

Incidentally I know the illustration here is ridiculous as well (as being gruseome – as are all the others you can find online) but there isn’t a way of illustrating the story without being ridiculous.

b) ‘William Wilson‘ is a well-constructed portrait of schizophrenia. If it was published today it would be unsuccessful – modern readers schooled in the ideas of psychotherapy will recognise very early in the many clues that the two characters, with the same name, appearance, age etc are one and the same person, but to readers of the 1840’s the story’s conclusion may well have been shocking.

c) ‘The Masque of the Red Death‘ is by comparison a dud, in which the supernatural is used as a deus ex machina that we see coming a long way off, and has little else to commend it.

d) ‘The Pit and the Pendulum‘. In this story the narrator is thrown into prison by the Inquisition, and awaits death by means of either a – well, you can guess. The tension is built slowly and effectively, and the prison/torture chamber is ingeniously recreated. The outcome, the narrator’s survival, is ensured by his ability to tell the tale, but his escape from the Inquisition is well managed.

e) ‘Hop-Frog‘ returns to a more fairy-story theme begun in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’.  Set in an unidentified European country in the Middle Ages, a cruel king is unkind to his court jester, and suffers revenge appropriate to his offences.

f) ‘The Case of Amontillado’. A collection of short stories within the horror genre would not be complete without a take featuring someone walled into their grave, and this is it. It is reasonably well done but takes a considerable effort to suspend belief long enough to be in any way disturbed by the outcome, given that it is flagged so early on.

g) ‘The Tell-Tale Heart‘. “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man”. This is a well-written short story in which a man commits a murder, but is betrayed by the sound of the still beating heart. It’s a convincing portrait of psychopathy, in which the speech patterns of the killer, the use of repetition

h) ‘The Man that was Used Up‘ is an extended shaggy dog story not worth the short time it would take to read; the joke falls very flat despite the prolonged set up, at least in part because the narrator is such a boor.

Overall these stories are interesting early examples of the horror genre, and are worth reading for the introduction to the model for Sherlock Holmes if nothing else. I am not sure to what extent Poe’s original readers would have found these stories scary or horrific; they have not aged well as our appetites for blood and guts has become more extreme. Usually attempts at humour fall flat, and it is the simpler stories such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ which are the more effective.