https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
Right here on Halloween of 2024, we now have a larger variety of scary stories — and arguably, a a lot scarier variety of scarier stories — to select from than ever earlier than. However whatever their relevance to the specific lives we could stay and the specific dreads we could really feel immediately, what number of such curlease works stand an opportunity of being learn a couple of centuries from now, with not simply historical interest however genuine chills? With every Halloween that brings us close toer to the two hundredth anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary debut, the works of that American pioneer of the grotesque and the macabre develop solely extra deeply troubling.
“The phrase that recurs most crucially in Poe’s fictions is horror,” writes Marilynne Robinson within the New York Overview of Books. “His stories are sometimes formed to deliver the narrator and the learner to a spot the place the usage of the phrase is justified, the place the phrase and the experience it evokes are explored or by implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that’s not characteristic of main literature in general. Clearly Poe was fascinated by popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial” — obsessions that haven’t misplaced a lot popularity since his day.
Examinationined extra shutly, “the horror that fascinated him and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is commonly the inescapable confrontation of the self by a perfect justice, the expocertain of a responsible act in a kind that makes its revelation a recoil of the thoughts in opposition to itself.” That is true, Robinson writes, of such still-widely-read works as “The Fall of the Home of Usher,” “The Masque of the Pink Dying,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Inform-Story Coronary heart.”
You’ll be able to hear all of these stories and extra in the Youtube playlist above, narrated by a variety of perkinders immediately recognizin a position by voice alone: Christopher Lee, Vincent Worth, William S. Burroughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rathbone, and the late James Earl Jones.
Whether or not learn aloud or on the web page, Robinson notes, Poe “has at all times been reviled or celebrated for the absence of ethical content in his work, even if these tales are all straightforward ethical parables. For a author so intrigued by the operations of the thoughts as Poe was, an interest in conscience results in an interest in concealment and self-deception, issues which are secretive and excessively individual and on the identical time so universal that they form civilizations.” Whereas there are civilizations, there might be tell-tale hearts; and whereas there are tell-tale hearts, there might be an audience responsive to Edgar Allan Poe’s model of horror, on Halloween or any other evening.
Related content:
Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books
Why Ought to You Learn Edgar Allan Poe? An Animated Video Explains
7 Ideas from Edgar Allan Poe on The way to Write Vivid Stories and Poems
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.
