Short Stories – 420 pages – my copy (paperback; 1993) bought for £2 from the Notting Hill Music & Goods Exchange during 2008
- 4 nods out of 5 -
Tales of mystery, of suspense, and all things that go bump in the night; Mr Poe is the undisputed narrator that has inspired and frightened generations of readers since the mid-nineteenth century. And quite right, too! He has given us stories of madness, of death, of mystery, of crime, and well as the down right silly.
This is the second encounter the Worm has had with Edgar Allan Poe: back in June 2011 he came across magnificent The Raven (a bona fide 4 nodder; click on the link below). Tales of Mystery & Imagination is a collection of short stories – and it is the short story that Poe is best known – ranging from the classic (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Pit and Pendulum’ being two notables), with the maddening (‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’), along with adventuring solving tales (such as the book’s opener ‘The Gold Bug’; or as the contents page of the book refers to: ‘The Gold Buf’?!). All in all, Poe is seen by many as the inventor of shock, of the supernatural, of detective fiction, as well as dabbling in an early form of Science-Fiction; quite a CV for a man who married his cousin and died at the young age of forty.
The earlier stories, of crime-solving of the Sherlock Holmes variety (although written fifty years before Holmes’ inception, it must be remembered), are not Poe at his best. Although there is a soft spot for detective C. Auguste Dupin, the shock and the horror that Poe is famed for is absent. The book slowly moves towards darker material, whilst keeping that spirit of suspense alive.
Poe’s art has been discussed and analysed heavily in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; with its hidden messages behind the gothic description. The idea of the “living dead” crops up in many of the stories, including ‘The Premature Burial'; whilst the idea that your past and conscience cannot be put to rest are explored fantastically in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’. Undoubtedly Poe had an eye for the majestic and descriptive, as affirmed in the beating of the murdered man’s heart beneath the floorboards, driving the killer beyond sanity.
It is shame for those who gathered the stories together to miss what the Worm considers his favourite Poe short-story: 'William Wilson'. Think a nineteenth-century version of Fight Club, and you’ll be on the right track! Another absentee is the darkly philosophical ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. But that would be picking a fight with those who collated the stories together – yes, you editors at Penguin Classics! – rather than with Poe himself. The writer has left a treasure trove of quality stories to read; some are 5 nod gold standard, others of the weaker nodder variety. But nobody, and the Worm means NOBODY, forgets Poe once they’ve read one of his stories.
Buy it here:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tales-Mystery-Imagination-Edgar-Allan/dp/0861366522/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1323257658&sr=1-11
Read the Worm’s review on The Raven:http://4eyedbookworm.blogspot.com/2011/06/raven-edgar-allan-poe.html)
A good website about Poe’s work:http://www.poestories.com/
