‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by Edgar Allan Poe

This story is pure allegory, and universally applicable. The Masque of the Red Death is always occurring somewhere, because somewhere, always, there is an empire about to topple, dancing its final mad debauched dance in a vampiric centre, as turmoil and death crowds in from an exploited periphery. It’s happening now, out in the world. “Voluptuous” walled-in masquerades conducted by collective entities embodied by Poe’s dreadful Duke, whose “plans were bold and fiery”, whose “conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre”. But great walls, ditches and fences will not keep out the monstrous ghostly forces that such systems ultimately necessitate. And, as sure as sunset, one by one, the dancers will drop “in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel”. Poe’s allegory, however, will never die.

First published in Graham’s Magazine, 1842. Collected in Selected Tales, Oxford University Press, 2008, and available online here

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ by Edgar Allan Poe

For a short while in my teens everything was rich and swirling and sinister in my reading and writing. We had to write Gothic fiction for A Level, and I wrote a story called ‘The Bride’, about a newly married couple who find a house full of strange paintings and cello music. The husband gets entranced by a figure in a painting and walks about the house look for him, forgetting his wife. By the end, she has disappeared and is now in one of the paintings, on a bed of nails. My teacher wrote, ‘I love the ambiguity of the man’s sexuality and his ultimate ambivalence for his wife.’ It was pretty much a copy of this story, when I think of it, but I was proud of myself as though it was all my own doing.

ANYWAY, I blame this Poe story (and The Picture of Dorian Gray) which I still dream about now, for all that. It’s so visual, and full of the strange spyglass of sulphuric detail that Poe’s fiction is full of, somehow exterior and interior. It’s the kind of story you read in the dark, even if you’re reading it on a park bench in the sunshine. I could say lots about it, about Poe, about writing that thrills, or disturbs, or about short stories that do that. But I won’t. We’ve all been there.

It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression.

Exactly.

First published in 1839. My copy from The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, Penguin Classics; Rev Ed edition 2003

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe

This is a story of paranoia, obsession and guilt, of post-Sophoclean horror and pre-Freudian psychosis.

True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

This is the first short story I remember reading that stayed with me, that I copied out to see how it was done, that – at the pretentious age of seventeen – I decided to turn into a play and got as far as ‘casting’ it. I disagree with Henry James who wrote, “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher… Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.” Bitch.

First published in The Pioneer, 1843, and widely available in Penguin Little Black Classics, 2015 and online here)