The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings

This collection gathers 16 short stories, a novel, and 15 poems by Edgar Allan Poe, spanning his major contributions to Gothic horror, detective fiction, adventure writing, and Romantic poetry.

The collection opens with "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which an unnamed narrator insists on his sanity while confessing to murder. He claims to love the old man with whom he lives but is tormented by the man's pale blue eye, which resembles a vulture's. After creeping into the old man's room for seven consecutive nights, he kills him on the eighth, dismembers the corpse, and hides the pieces beneath the floorboards. When police arrive, the narrator seats them over the concealed body. A rhythmic sound he interprets as the dead man's heartbeat grows unbearably loud, and, convinced the officers hear it and are mocking him, he shrieks his confession.

In "The Black Cat," a man awaiting execution recounts how an alcohol addiction destroyed his gentle nature. He gouges out the eye of his beloved cat, Pluto, then hangs the animal from a tree, driven by what he calls the spirit of perverseness. A nearly identical one-eyed black cat appears, its white chest marking gradually assuming the shape of a gallows. When the cat trips him in the cellar, he swings an axe at it; his wife intercepts his arm, and he buries the axe in her brain instead. He walls her corpse behind a false chimney. When police search the house days later, the narrator raps boastfully on the wall, and a shriek erupts from within: The cat, accidentally sealed inside with the body, betrays his crime.

"The Cask of Amontillado" follows Montresor, who vows revenge after enduring countless injuries and a final insult from his acquaintance Fortunato. During carnival, Montresor lures the intoxicated Fortunato into the catacombs beneath his palazzo, ostensibly to verify a cask of rare sherry called Amontillado. Deep underground, Montresor chains Fortunato inside a narrow niche and bricks up the entrance. Fortunato's pleas go unanswered. Montresor reports that for 50 years no one has disturbed the remains.

In "The Fall of the House of Usher," an unnamed narrator visits his childhood friend Roderick Usher, who has an acute nervous disorder and lives in a decaying ancestral mansion with his ailing twin sister, Madeline. Madeline apparently dies and is entombed in a vault beneath the house. Days later, during a violent storm, Roderick confesses he has heard her stirring in her coffin. The doors burst open, and the bloodied Madeline falls upon her brother; both die. The narrator flees as the house splits along a fissure visible since his arrival and collapses into the dark tarn, a mountain lake, below.

"The Masque of the Red Death" depicts Prince Prospero, who retreats with 1,000 courtiers into a sealed abbey to escape a plague that kills within half an hour. Months later, at a masked ball in seven color-themed rooms, a figure dressed as the Red Death itself appears at midnight. Prospero pursues the intruder with a dagger but falls dead upon confronting the figure. The revelers seize the figure and find nothing beneath its costume. One by one, every guest dies, and darkness claims the abbey.

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" presents a mesmerist who, seeking to test whether mesmerism can arrest death, places his dying friend M. Ernest Valdemar, a man with advanced tuberculosis, into a trance at the moment of death. From the trance, Valdemar declares he is dead, and he remains suspended for seven months, showing no signs of life yet not decaying. When the mesmerist finally attempts to wake him, Valdemar's body instantly crumbles into a liquid mass of putrescence.

In "Ligeia," a scholar obsessively mourns his first wife, Ligeia, a woman of extraordinary beauty and learning who fiercely resisted death. After Ligeia dies, the grief-stricken narrator, now dependent on opium, marries Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine, whom he loathes. When Rowena dies, her corpse undergoes repeated cycles of revival and relapse through the night. The shrouded figure finally rises, and the narrator recognizes not Rowena but the raven-haired, dark-eyed Ligeia.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" feature the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. In the first tale, Dupin solves the murders of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille, whose bodies were found in a locked fourth-story apartment, determining through analytical reasoning that the killer was an escaped orangutan. In "The Purloined Letter," Dupin recovers a politically sensitive letter stolen by Minister D— from a royal personage. While the police have searched the Minister's residence exhaustively, Dupin reasons that D— would hide the letter in plain sight. He finds it on a card-rack, disguised as a worthless note, and swaps it for a facsimile during an arranged distraction.

Other stories include "A Descent into the Maelström," in which a Norwegian fisherman survives a massive whirlpool by lashing himself to a barrel; "The Pit and the Pendulum," where a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition escapes a razor-sharp descending pendulum and red-hot contracting walls before the French army rescues him; "Ms. Found in a Bottle," in which a narrator is swept aboard a ghostly ship plunging toward a polar whirlpool; "The Premature Burial," where a man with catalepsy, a condition causing deathlike trances, is cured of his fear of live burial when he mistakes a sloop's cramped berth for a coffin; "William Wilson," in which a dissolute man is pursued by his moral double, whom he stabs at a masquerade only to realize he has destroyed himself; "Eleonora," where a narrator breaks a deathbed vow to his beloved cousin but is absolved by her spirit; and "Silence—A Fable," a parable in which a Demon discovers that absolute silence is the one terror that drives a man to flee.

Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, follows a Nantucket youth who stows away aboard the whaling brig Grampus. After a violent mutiny, Pym, his friend Augustus Barnard, the half-Native American crewman Dirk Peters, and a surviving mutineer named Richard Parker endure shipwreck and starvation. Parker is killed and consumed by lot, and Augustus dies of gangrene. Pym and Peters are rescued by the schooner Jane Guy, which sails into Antarctic waters and discovers islands inhabited by natives who feign friendship before annihilating the crew in a massive landslide and destroying the ship. Pym and Peters escape with a captive named Nu-Nu, sailing southward into increasingly strange conditions: water that turns milky white, falling white ash, and a range of gray vapor resembling a limitless cataract. A shrouded figure of perfect whiteness, far larger than any human, rises before them as the narrative breaks off. An editorial note explains that Pym died before completing the final chapters.

The poetry includes some of Poe's most celebrated verse. "The Raven" presents a grieving scholar visited at midnight by a raven that answers every desperate question with "Nevermore." "Annabel Lee" memorializes a love so powerful that neither angels nor demons can sever it, even in death. "The Bells" progresses through four types of bells, from silver sleigh bells of merriment to iron funeral bells tolled by ghouls. "Ulalume" follows a speaker and his Soul through a haunted woodland to the forgotten tomb of a lost beloved. Other poems, including "To Helen," "Lenore," "Israfel," "The City in the Sea," and "Alone," explore beauty, mourning, isolation, and the mysteries that divide the living from the dead.