edgar allan poe tales of mystery & imagination

Reinforcing this metaphor is, of course, the painting of Father Time that the narrator notices on the ceiling. The ever-present omen of impending death is symbolized by the slowly descending pendulum, cutting our time shorter and shorter. Selecting mankind’s oldest and most primal fears, Poe blends them together into a tale that taps into the human psyche and reminds us of the things that terrified us when we were children. The imagery depicted in his intensely chilling tale The Pit and the Pendulum is inarguably among the most memorable of the horror genre. It should come as no surprise to readers that Poe’s most famous works, the ones that have inspired countless films, TV shows and parodies, are among his best. We shall also investigate some modern iterations of these themes in the form of contemporary literature, cinema and even video games. Instead, we shall simply examine the themes in these stories, how they are expressed or depicted, and how they instill fear in a reader’s mind. As his collection of short stories is generally regarded as a classic, and very much divided from contemporary literature, the act of reviewing it would be superfluous. While an examination of his more fantastic writing may follow, it is his most famous works, his Gothic tales, that we will be examining thus. As most of his work was published in different magazines and periodicals, it can probably be assumed that this was an attempt to fit the tone of specific publications, or perhaps to simply reach a wider audience. He offers a selection of different genres to his reader. This is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Poe’s work, considering his reputation as a horror writer. Standard works of fiction, in other words. While many of Poe’s stories, his most famous works in any case, are explorations of mankind’s most primal fears, there are others that act simply as windows into the everyday of the mid-nineteenth century. There were some stories of Poe that were not to my taste, yet I could appreciate the way in which they were constructed and also the point that they were trying to make. At times, reading through these tales was a slog and felt more like work than leisure.īut it is the kind of work that is incredibly satisfying upon completion.

The language, while beautiful in an often quite twisted way, is old-fashioned and occasionally outdated. At 763 pages, reading this tome of 19th century writing is not a task that should be considered lightly. It was with an air of exultation that I turned the last page of The Masque of Red Death and finally finished all of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar allan poe tales of mystery & imagination