Selected Tales (World's Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Sickening brilliance.
Review: I used to loathe Poe's style, whose involutions seemed to drain his work of all their professed horror, while admiring the way he smuggled hugely complex ideas into popular modes - no wonder Hitchcock adored him. Now, as I grow older, I begin to value Poe more, recognise his obsessions and fears in myself, while marvelling at a style that manages to convey hothouse exoticism with remarkable, chilling precision.

Of the three stories I read recently in this volume, Morella is the least successful, a rehash of Leonora (a dead wife is reincarnated in her daughter), but there a brilliance in Poe's dramatising of an idea that is admirable.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is truly disgusting and horrifying. A hynotist experiments on a dying man to see if he can prolong life after death. The cool analytic style lead contemporaries to confuse it with a medical testcase (it was published in a scientific journal), but what is most memorable is the anguish of the dead man who cannot rest.

Best of all though is the immortal Black Cat. Violent and unconsionable, the brutalities in this story are among the most grotesque in literature, both to animals and to people. Poe's style is at his most poetically sustained as he describes the most vile barbarities with his character's objectionable self-pity. What is most sublime, though, is the note of black comedy that is laced throughout, which would be foregrounded in Roger Corman's hilarious version in Tales Of Terror.

Van Leer's introduction is informative enough, but there is a note of begrudgery and a refusal to take Poe altogether seriously, that is aggravating.