Selected Tales

Book summary

This collection brings together ten of Poe’s tales, from houses eaten away by their past to the confessions of murderers who believe themselves perfectly sane. It includes The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart and the first investigation of the Chevalier Dupin. Most are told in the first person by a narrator caught between reason and terror, and the tension tightens until the very last line. Together they explore guilt, madness, death and the limits of the mind that observes them. Here Poe sets the lasting forms of the horror story as well as of the detective story.