The Horrors of Poe

I love horror literature. It’s twisted and crazy and makes you think about all the bad things that could possibly happen. It doesn’t rely on cheap scares like movies do. In most cases, horror literature can twist your expectations and understanding of reality so much that you don’t know where the next big scare is coming from.

Poe has an interesting style of horror, one that seems to fade in and out of style. He refers to it in “The Philosophy of Composition” when talking about his famed poem: all of the events are plausible cases of unlucky circumstance. If all of the things happened in just a certain way and order, then we could actually recreate a raven saying “Nevermore” to a man grieving over his dead lover, driving him mad. No special effects required. (The chances of getting these events to happen like in the poem are quite small, however. So if this does happen in real life it’s more likely that someone is pulling a Poe-related prank.)

This string of plausibility can be found in all of his stories. “The Tell-Tale Heart” may be the most famous one. We are all probably on the side that the narrator is insane. That is the “sane” version of the story. But there is enough room in the story itself to believe that something supernatural has occurred. What if the old man’s eye was really demonic? And maybe the heartbeat wasn’t just in the narrator’s head, but a sound that only he could hear as the guilty party?

“The Masque of the Red Death” has a similar way of dealing with the supernatural and the realistic, although the roles are reverse in ways. Who doesn’t want to believe that the mysterious figure is the Red Death personified, and his appearance spreads a quickened version of the death to all of the party goers? On the other hand, it could be a very talented and disgruntled assassin who decided to take justice into his own hands and poisoned the food and drinks with something that would leave results that look like the Red Death. We really don’t know.

There’s many horror literature pieces today that lack this ability to survive different perceptions. Lovecraft, for example, makes it explicitly clear that most of his horrors are effects from “alien intervention.” While they make great tales that can make you fear the possible unknown, it is still not that hard to disbelieve that every single instance of oddity is caused by interdimensional beings.

But circumstances that twist to terrifying tales? How about your own sanity breaking and leaving you unable to trust your own judgment? That could happen to anyone. And Poe is one of the few writers who create the effects so well.