Creepy Tales

A murderer insists upon his sanity while obsessing over an old man's pale blue eye; a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition wakes in pitch darkness, strapped to a wooden frame beneath a swinging, razor-sharp pendulum; a prince bolts the iron gates of his abbey to throw a masquerade ball while the Red Death ravages the countryside outside; a man seeking revenge leads a drunken rival deep into the damp catacombs with the promise of a rare cask of Amontillado.

In these nineteenth-century stories, Edgar Allan Poe stripped the Gothic tradition of its supernatural monsters and relocated the terror into the guilt and paranoia of his narrators. This volume gathers seven works of macabre fiction, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," and "The Premature Burial."

By documenting the breakdown of the rational mind with clinical precision, Poe established the mechanics of psychological suspense and laid the foundation for horror in American literature.