In his stories lots of things happen twice. “I was sick – sick unto death … why will you say I am mad … tomorrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” These are the voices of existential anxiety we have come to know via Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, and Kafka. Everything is in the grip of a narrator who is normally relating events at emotional fever pitch. Characters rarely engage in conversation. Very little is overtly dramatized in Poe stories. These are images of the Gothic that have kept the horror movie industry fuelled with content for almost the last hundred years.
But what makes them so striking and memorable is that the idea is both articulated via the narrator’s anguished state of mind and encapsulated in a vivid image – going down in a sinking ship suffering torture in the Spanish Inquisition a premature burial and a heart which continues to beat even after a brutal murder. He often starts a story with a philosophic reflection, and the central purpose of the story is to illustrate the idea.
Hoffmann, but his influence has been much more widespread, and interestingly, given this influence, he was the first well-known American author to earn his living through writing – though this did not prevent him dying in poverty and neglect (dressed in somebody else’s clothes). In fact he was preceded in some of these by E.T.A. Edgar Allan Poe is celebrated as the originator of several types of short story – the tale of Gothic horror, the science fiction story, the detective story, the tall tale, the puzzle, and the literary hoax. Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the name often given to collections of Poe’s stories. Collectively, these tales represent the best of Edgar Allan Poe’s prose work before his premature death in 1849.Short stories of Gothic horror and the macabre ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ are key works in the horror canon, while in the ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ we find the origins modern detective fiction. They are peopled with neurotics and social outcasts, obsessed with nameless terrors or preoccupied with seemingly insoluble mysteries.
They range from the poetic to the mysterious to the darkly comic, yet all possess the genius for the grotesque that defines Poe’s writing. This collection of Poe’s work contains some of the most exciting and haunting stories ever written. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles.
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