Horror, grief, obsession, and early detective fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American writer, poet, and critic known for horror stories and early detective fiction. He worked for several magazines as an editor and reviewer. In his criticism, he argued that a short story should produce a single effect and that each detail should contribute to it.
His horror stories often use narrators whose fear, guilt, or obsession affects the account they give. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is narrated by a killer trying to defend his sanity, while “The Fall of the House of Usher” follows a visitor to a troubled household. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” C. Auguste Dupin investigates a crime through observation and reasoning. Poe uses both unreliable accounts and detailed investigations to control when information becomes available.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
A connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
A man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
A Norwegian fisherman explains how careful observation saved him when a hurricane swept his boat into the Maelström.
Psyche Zenobia climbs an Edinburgh steeple in search of material for a sensation article and puts her head through a clock face.
During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, three temple officials pay the soldiers below for animals to use in sacrifice.
A sick young man enters the Virginia mountains and returns with a precise memory of dying in another century.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A cook who considers himself a great philosopher receives a visit from the Devil and tries to bargain away his soul.
A mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
After promising his dying cousin that he will never love again, a grieving man leaves their hidden valley and faces a second love.
A guide takes a modern visitor through ancient Antioch, where a violent king prepares an animal costume for his latest public triumph.
A captive court jester must design one more masquerade for the king who treats him and his friend as property.
An ambitious literary society secretary asks a famous editor to teach her the formula for a fashionable tale of extreme sensation.
Two drunken sailors enter a plague-sealed London district and interrupt a grotesque court meeting in an undertaker’s shop.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
A widower obsessed with his brilliant first wife brings a second bride into an abbey shaped by grief, opium, and dread.
A man becomes a social celebrity by making his nose the subject of a supposedly learned science.
A man literally loses his breath and is mistaken for dead through a series of violent mishaps.
After a storm destroys his ship, a skeptical traveler finds himself aboard an ancient vessel racing toward the South Pole.
A bored passenger on a future balloon tour writes a letter full of confident errors about the nineteenth century.
A dying skeptic submits to mesmerism and uses the trance to answer questions about God, matter, pain, and life after death.
A cruel young baron takes possession of a violent horse that may carry the spirit of his family's dead enemy.
A widower watches his daughter grow into an exact copy of the wife whose death he once desired.
A solemn student prankster tests a famous duelist’s pride with an insult designed to turn etiquette against him.
Toby Dammit's habit of betting the Devil his head becomes literal when a stranger accepts the wager at a covered bridge.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
A demon describes a solitary man who endures a violent, unnatural landscape until the world around him becomes completely still.
A group of confident American scholars revives an Egyptian mummy and discovers that he has a low opinion of modern progress.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
After saving a child from a Venetian canal, a mysterious man keeps a final appointment with the child's married mother.
A condemned man traces his ruin through alcohol, cruelty, and two black cats that seem to expose every crime he hides.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
Two reunited lovers discuss humanity's collapse and what one of them experienced as his body died, decayed, and lost its senses.
Two souls meet after Earth’s destruction, and one explains how a newly discovered comet ended the human world.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
A vain French duke dies over a badly served delicacy and challenges the Devil to a card game for his freedom.
A mesmerist tests whether hypnosis can hold a dying man at the point between life and death.
A reclusive naturalist follows a cryptogram from a found parchment into the South Carolina woods in search of pirate treasure.
A condemned man argues that people are sometimes driven to do what they know will destroy them.
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
A wealthy young man rejects status and politics to treat landscape gardening as an art and a plan for a happy life.
A barber's son explains how plagiarism, paid praise, personal attacks, and business deals made him a national literary authority.
A curious narrator searches for the secret behind a celebrated war hero whose perfect appearance seems too complete to be natural.
A convalescent observer follows an unreadable old man through London, convinced that his need for crowds hides a life of crime.
A prince walls his court inside a castellated abbey to outparty a plague — through seven colored rooms.
When two women are brutally killed in a locked Paris room, Dupin tests the evidence that the police dismiss.
A curious passenger becomes obsessed with an artist's six-foot box and the strange marriage surrounding it on a voyage to New York.
A wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
Condemned by the Inquisition, a prisoner must understand each new torture before darkness, a hidden pit, and a descending blade kill him.
Two newly immortal spirits cross the stars while one explains how every word and action continues to shape the universe.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
A stolen royal letter remains inside a minister's home despite months of secret police searches, and Dupin asks what they failed to see.
A vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
During a cholera outbreak, a nervous man sees a monstrous creature crawling down a distant hill.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
A town's most trusted man leads the hunt for a missing neighbor while every clue points to the victim's disgraced nephew.
A young couple uses two sailors' conflicting dates to satisfy an uncle's impossible demand that three Sundays fall in one week.
A journalist reports that an obscure chemist has found a way to turn lead into pure gold.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
A proud newspaper editor answers a rival's insult with a paragraph built around one letter, then the type runs out.
