Alex Gonzalez – Francis Bass

Every year around October I like to read spooky books and every year around November I post about what I read and this is this year’s post and previous posts can be read here okay let’s go!

The Gold-Bug and other tales by Edgar Allan Poe — This is a collection of some of Poe’s most famous and celebrated short stories. Instead of reviewing it as a whole, I’m going to do a mini-review of each story!

LIGEIA. A widower remarries, then his second wife dies. He spends a night confined in a bedchamber with the corpse, and repeatedly sees the corpse flush with life again, and begin to resemble his first wife, Ligeia. A decent story, ticks a lot of the Poe boxes (dead women, “I’m not crazy,” horrifying architecture), though not the best of any of those categories. The poem “The Conqueror Worm” is cool.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. Narrator visits the final remnant of the House of Usher, a brother and sister, living in a gloomy decadent manor. The physical house and the family house are identified. It’s a pretty straightforward concept but well executed.

THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE. I hate this story. After an obnoxious throat-clearing half-baked essay on chess vs. checkers, we get an extremely contrived mystery. The themes are a mess, as the narrator at times insists on a kind of implacable “x can only mean y” logic, but at others appeals to chaos and coincidence, with no coherent schema to integrate the two. The story is quite remarkable as the first English detective story, an obvious blueprint for Sherlock Holmes, but it doesn’t hold up on its own.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. Quarantine party 🥳💃🎉. Hey, who’s that uggo with the death mask?? 💀 More surreal, horrifying architecture here. Short and sweet.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Okay, this one is really about the horrifying architecture. Narrator finds himself in a deep dark dungeon, at the mercy of the Spanish Inquisition. Increasingly elaborate life-threatening machinations are introduced. Morbidly delightful. Jigsaw should take notes.

THE TELL-TALE HEART. A perfect story. Poe believed that short story writers should strive for a unity of effect, where every element of the story is chosen and crafted in the service of that effect. In a review of Hawthorne he wrote, “If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” “The Tell-Tale Heart” achieves this better than any other Poe story I’ve read, and stands as a great testament to the virtue of this approach. Its first sentence is “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” and there’s not a single wrong step from there.