Monday, December 28, 2015

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write Scary Short Stories?



The basic questioned posited as the title of this article may seem rudimentary to some, but to those new to Edgar Allan Poe it is not. The short (story) answer is that Edgar Allan Poe wrote many scary short stories. It's debatable which is his most popular, but surely these are in the Top Ten Poe short stories: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado."

Below is a complete list of Poe's short stories:

"A Tale of Jerusalem" (1832)
"Bon-Bon" (1832)
"Loss of Breath" (1832)
"Metzengerstein" (1832)
"The Duc de L'Omelette" (1832)
"Four Beasts in One" (1833)
"MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833)
"The Assignation" (1834)
"Berenice" (1835)
"King Pest" (1835)
"Lionizing" (1835)
"Morella" (1835)
"Shadow" (1835)
"Mystification" (1837)
"A Predicament" (1838)
"How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838)
"Ligeia" (1838)
"Silence - A Fable" (1838)
"The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839)
"The Devil in the Belfry" (1839)
"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)
"The Man That Was Used Up" (1839)
"Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" (1839)
"William Wilson" (1839)
"[The Bloodhounds]" (1840)
"The Business Man" (1840)
"The Man of the Crowd" (1840)
"A Descent into the Maelström" (1841)
"Eleonora" (1841)
"Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (1841)
"The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841)
"The Island of the Fay" (1841)
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
"Three Sundays in a Week" (1841)
"The Gold-Bug" (1842)
"The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)
"The Mystery of Marie RogĂȘt" (1842)
"The Oval Portrait" (1842)
"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842)
"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1843)
"Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843)
"The Black Cat" (1843)
"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
"Mesmeric Revelation" (1844)
"Thou Art the Man" (1844)
"The Angel of the Odd" (1844)
"The Balloon-Hoax" (1844)
"The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844)
"The Oblong Box" (1844)
"The Premature Burial" (1844)
"The Purloined Letter" (1844)
"The Spectacles" (1844)
"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1844)
"Some Words with a Mummy" (1845)
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)
"The Imp of the Perverse" (1845)
"The Magazine Prison House" (1845)
"The Power of Words" (1845)
"[The Rats of Park Theatre]" (1845)
"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845)
"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
"The Domain of Arnheim" (1846)
"The Sphinx" (1846)"Hop-Frog" (1849)
"Landor's Cottage" (1849)
"Mellonta Tauta" (1849)
"Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849)
"X-ing a Paragrab" (1849)

#PoeShortStories #EdgarAllanPoe

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe as Read by Jeff Buckley

Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe


One of my favorite Poe poems is "Ulalume" published in 1848. It is his only poem centered around October--a month Poe owns like no other. Read Edgar Allan Poe's annotated poems.

Check out this haunting reading by Jeff Buckley. It has a Jim Morrison feel.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Black Cat Song by Broadcast




Recently I posted Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" along with a photo of the house in Philadelphia where he wrote it. One of the best songs ever written about the scary short story is:

Song: Black Cat
Band: Broadcast

I'm sure Poe would have loved this song. Check it out on SoundCloud!

#BroadcastBlackCat #BlackCat #EdgarAllanPoe

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write a Werewolf Short Story?


Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote scary stories in a number of supernatural genres. He did not invent the horror short story, but he took it to unbelievable heights. Poe penned ghost stories. He was the first to invent a closed room murder mystery (The Murders in the Rue Morgue of 1841) and a founding father of science fiction short stories. Poe also was the first to take us inside the head of a crazy man in The Tell-Tale Heart of 1843.

Yet Edgar Allan Poe failed to cover a few crucial genres in his short stories. For instance, he did not write a vampire or monster story. I have blogged on the former in the past. That is unfortunate as I am convinced that no one could have written a vampire story like Poe. What's more, zombie's had not been created in Poe's time.

Unfortunately, Poe also did not write a werewolf story. Below is a list of werewolf stories originally published in the English language during Poe's lifetime, which he may have read. They are found in Transformation: The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849:

1831 The Man-Wolf by Leitch Ritche (1800-1865)
1846 A Story of a Weir-Wolf by Catherine Crowe (1790-1872)
1828 The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin by Richard Thomson (1794-1865)
1839 The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)
1838 Hugues the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages by Sutherland Menzies [Mrs. Elizabeth Stone] (1806-1883)

#WerewolfStories #BestWerewolfStories