A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
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 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 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.
A group of confident American scholars revives an Egyptian mummy and discovers that he has a low opinion of modern progress.
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 connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
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 vain French duke dies over a badly served delicacy and challenges the Devil to a card game for his freedom.
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 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.
