The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Edgar Allan Poe since high school. I’m not quite sure what inspired me to pick up a book of his short stories, other than that I saw it, and it seemed to fit in nicely with my reread-stuff-I-read-in-high-school project, and it wasn’t too much of a commitment when my summer life started getting busy and I started reading less.

What I remember about my high school encounters with Edgar Allan Poe was that I didn’t think he was nearly as creepy as I thought he was going to be. I think maybe I was expecting ghosts and unsolved mysteries, but instead I got . But my conclusion the second time around, with both familiar and unfamiliar stories, was different. He’s creepy. Part of the change in my perception is that I read fewer Edgar Allan Poe stories in high school than I realized. There’s a gruesome double murder in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" that, while described with police report detachment, is as gory as any prime time television crime drama, but I never read that story in high school, nor had I read "The Pit and the Pendulum" or "The Fall of the House of Usher" (this was news to me - the names are so familiar that I just took it for granted that they were part of the high school reading list).

But I also think that in high school I didn't have quite enough life experience to understand what makes the skin crawl. Edgar Allan Poe's stories, with some exceptions, don’t require blood or putrefaction or the supernatural. They are psychologically unnerving.

But not all of them. I was surprised to find out that Edgar Allan Poe wrote more than just creepy. The first story in the book was a mock newspaper article written in the spirit of speculative fiction, and another piece later in the book could only be classified as humor, a bit satiric and not in the least dark. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" read like Sherlock Holmes. Poe's fiction was a lot more diverse than I knew.

Reading the stories made me want to know more about the man who wrote them. I read the introduction to the book (something I always intend to do with classics, but rarely get around to), and a month or two after finishing the stories I got to visit the Edgar Allan Poe memorial (and his grave site) in Baltimore, the city he claimed as his home, but I can't say I know much. Still, after reading this book I feel like I know Poe a little better than I did in high school, and better understand his place in literature and history and culture.