The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), 1850
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Poe's detective Dupin, a whirlpool, a black cat, a revenge vow: tales that made detection and dread into modern literary pleasures. A strange freedom runs under the dread and curiosity, as gothic tales shift from detection to madness and revenge in dense nineteenth-century prose.
Feels like dread, unease and curiosity. About freedom, madness and morality.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy early detective stories, gothic unease, and narrators who sound rational while edging toward obsession. The nineteenth-century sentences and long build-ups can be demanding, and some tales dwell on cruelty and madness.
Why read it
Read it for the stories that helped shape detective fiction and for Poe's unnerving way of making a mind's fixed idea feel like a trap closing.
Pages from the book
The logic of revenge, laid out with terrifying patience.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. The strange calm that arrives when the worst has already happened.
“It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of the gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was despair that strung my nerves. The more you tell yourself a fear is irrational, the stronger it gets.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—that of looking down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. Edgar Allan Poe.Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) introduced C. Auguste Dupin, often called the first fictional detective; Doyle's Holmes later acknowledged the model.
Books that feel like this
More by Edgar Allan Poe
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, 1838
Shipwreck, starvation, obsessive grief, and a plague masquerade in an undertaker's shop: Poe's strangest long tales and sketches gathered in one volume.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe, 1845
A grieving scholar, a midnight raven, and one word that refuses to become comfort. The poem that made grief sound like a knock at the door.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Works of Edgar Allan Poe for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy early detective stories, gothic unease, and narrators who sound rational while edging toward obsession. The nineteenth-century sentences and long build-ups can be demanding, and some tales dwell on cruelty and madness.
- What is The Works of Edgar Allan Poe like?
- A strange freedom runs under the dread and curiosity, as gothic tales shift from detection to madness and revenge in dense nineteenth-century prose. Feels like dread, unease and curiosity. About freedom, madness and morality.
- What should I read after The Works of Edgar Allan Poe?
- If you liked The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, try Dracula (Bram Stoker), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) and The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson).
A taste of the feed
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
The moment a familiar path becomes somewhere you have never been.
Clarke tried to conceive the thing again, as he sat by the fire, and again his mind shuddered and shrank back, appalled before the sight of such awful, unspeakable elements enthroned as it were, and triumphant in human flesh. Before him stretched the long dim vista of the green causeway in the forest, as his friend had described it; he saw the swaying leaves and the quivering shadows on the grass, he saw the sunlight and the flowers, and far away, far in the long distance, the two figures moved toward him. One was Rachel, but the other?
The Great God Pan · Arthur Machen
Some people hold a wounded bird the way a hungry person holds a plate.
It was clear that the kindest thing to do would be to put the bird out of its pain, but when I suggested that, she took a step back from me, and covered it with her other hand. Her eyes gleamed, her mouth smiled, and I saw the tip of her tongue swiftly pass over her lips as if licking them.
Ghost Stories · E. F. Benson
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