https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
Right here on Halloween of 2024, we’ve got a better variety of frightening stories — and arguably, a miles scarier variety of scarier stories — to make a choice from than ever earlier than. However whatever their relevance to the specific lives we would possibly reside and the specific dreads we would possibly really feel these days, what number of such curhire works stand a possibility of being learn a couple of centuries from now, with no longer simply historical interest however genuine chills? With each and every Halloween that brings us close toer to the two hundredth anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary debut, the works of that American pioneer of the ugly and the macabre develop best extra deeply troubling.
“The phrase that recurs maximum crucially in Poe’s fictions is horror,” writes Marilynne Robinson within the New York Evaluation of Books. “His stories are frequently formed to deliver the narrator and the learner to a spot the place using the phrase is justified, the place the phrase and the experience it conjures up are explored or via implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that isn’t characteristic of primary literature in general. Transparently Poe used to be fascinated via popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial” — obsessions that haven’t misplaced a lot popularity since his day.
Examinationined extra shutly, “the horror that fascinated him and gave such dreadful unity to his stories is frequently the inescapable confrontation of the self via a consistent withfect justice, the expocertain of a responsible act in a kind that makes its revel. a.tion a cringe of the thoughts in opposition to itself.” That is true, Robinson writes, of such still-widely-read works as “The Fall of the Area of Usher,” “The Masque of the Purple Dying,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Inform-Story Center.”
You’ll listen all of the ones stories and extra in the Youtube playlist above, narrated via a variety of consistent withshapeers immediately recognizin a position via voice on my own: Christopher Lee, Vincent Worth, William S. Burroughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rathbone, and the past due James Earl Jones.
Whether or not learn aloud or at the web page, Robinson notes, Poe “has at all times been reviled or celebrated for the absence of ethical content in his paintings, even supposing those stories are all immediatelyforward ethical parables. For a author so intrigued via the operations of the thoughts as Poe used to be, an interest in conscience results in an interest in concealment and self-deception, issues which are secretive and toply individual and on the similar time so universal that they form civilizations.” Whilst there are civilizations, there shall be tell-tale hearts; and whilst there are tell-tale hearts, there shall be an audience responsive to Edgar Allan Poe’s emblem of horror, on Halloween or any other night time.
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Listen the 14-Hour “Essential Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Inform-Story Center” & A lot Extra
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Watch a Peculiar Animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Inform-Story Center,” Voted the twenty fourth Very best Automotivetoon of All Time (1953)
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and hugecasts on towns, language, and culture. His initiatives come with the Substack newsletter Books on Towns and the ebook The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll thru Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceebook.
