Customer Rating:  
Summary: Tales of Edgar Allen Poe
Comment: I love Poe's writing, but this book is in the original "olde" English and is very difficult to read for me. So I am really not too happy with this particular version. I should have read the "small print".
ascott
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Summary: Take another flight to fantasy, but the mystery and humor are classic
Comment: This collection is hard to rate. The "Tales of Mystery and Horror" are very good, such classics that you have to remind yourself reading them that the tinges of romanticism are a function of the Romantic Age in which Poe was writing, and the cliches weren't when he penned them. The "Humor and Satire" section is even better, surprisingly funny without the occasional romantic excesses of the horror tales.
From there on out ("Flights and Fantasies", the novella "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket", and "The Poems") are virtually unreadable morasses of romanticism run amuck, long turgid descriptive paragraphs, and almost no dialogue.
Skip 'em.
Customer Rating:
Summary: POEtic Justice
Comment: Hey...what do I really need to say here? I mean, this is Edgar Allan Poe we're talking about! It's an excellent collection of his stories and poems. Many people are of the opinion that Poe's works are all rather macabre. Although many of his works do fit into that category, he was also a brilliant satirist. For example, I recommend his short story, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether". Quite hilarious, and very witty. Poe was a highly educated member of society, and was also the 'inventor' of the modern detective mystery with his short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." His incomparable literary style has gone unequaled to this day. For those already familiar with Poe, I suggest you read him again to have a fresh look at his works. For those who are NOT familiar with his works, you are missing out BIG time! Poe having been homegrown right here in America, we can be proud of his literary achievements. Check it out.
Allan F. Whitney
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Summary: The Enduring Master of the Macabre
Comment: Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809, died October 7, 1849.
What is it that makes an author famous? I don't mean famous in the sense a news article reports that "Jack Greylea's novels sold 15 million copies last year," but in the sense that he is thought of as being profound, and seminal. That he is quoted, and scholars analyse his works, and he is looked upon as being the original voice of his style, or the font from which many imitators have drawn inspiration.
Edgar Allan Poe is one such. The very hint of his name calls up images of midnight graveyards, of crumbling mansions lit by wax candles, the home of strange and tormented aristocrats, till the description "Poe-like" can draw as vivid a picture in our minds as "elephant-like."
Yet his output was not great. Basically a short story writer and poet, he produced only one full-length novel, which received more censure than praise, and which very few people today can name. Without wishing to run him down as an author (what he did, he did well, but what he did well, was to be Poe) he was a limited writer, and all of his works over twenty-two years can be contained in one thickish book.
So what is the secret of Poe, whereby a scanty writer becomes the cult-centre of a world of horror that carries his own stamp? It lies I think in two things.
Not to place these two in any order of importance as regards his continuing fame - I leave this to you - but I would say....
Firstly, that it was his choice of subject and execution of it. The mournful, weird and macabre, in which man becomes little more than an instrument of darkness, and that usually the worst darkness, that which wells up from within, whose black light shows us as being not the pawns of evil, but the source of evil itself. But to seize on this idea - or any other idea - as inspiration is nothing, merely the starting point from which the quill hits the paper. It is in the execution of his vision that Poe's genius emerges. Not with a great deal of subtlety, nor a much complexity, but with great and disciplined fixity on the horror of his intentions, Poe moves relentless to the nasty culmination of his stories, and they come to us with all the rawness of unconsoled misery. His art was that of the short story writer, and as such he wrote little, but when reading Poe a little is more than enough.
Secondly, that Poe more than any other author is identified as a man with his works. An orphan and an outcast from his adopted family, overly sensitive and reckless, he lived wildly, lied readily, lived in poverty, married strangely to his thirteen-year old cousin, was widowed miserably, and finally died mysteriously at age forty, from uncertain causes that speculation has named as anything from drug addiction to murder. As if this were not enough, his works were controlled after his death by his executor, who attempted to blacken his name. More than any other author that I can readily think of, Poe was his own tormented, tragic hero, and his oppressed characters were him.
In the nineteen-sixties, several of Poe's stories and poems - The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Raven, The Tomb of Legeia and others - were made into popular, low budget films, cementing Poe's reputation firmly into the mythology of modern horror movies. It's common of course for movies to be nothing like the original written work, but all of these are based on not on fully worked out novels, but ideas that Poe dealt with in comparatively few pages.
Incidentally, the principal actor in many of these was Vincent Price, whose tall, mournful frame instantly springs to mind as well nigh inseparable from Poe's weird gems.
Graham Worthington, author, Wake of the Raven
Customer Rating:
Summary: poes book
Comment: I bought this book as a gift for my friend. She loved it.I was so glad I was able to find it here.
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