Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

In his introduction to Bloomsbury’s striking new edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination Neil Gaiman says:

Poe’s stories – even his humorous tales, even his detective stories – are populated by amnesiacs and obsessives, by people doomed to remember what they desire only to forget, and are told be madmen and liars and lovers and ghosts. They are powered by what remains untold as much as by what Poe tells us, each of them split and shivered by a crack as deep and as dangerous as the fissure that runs from top to bottom of the gloomy house inhabited by Roderick and Madeline Usher.

… which is probably as fine a description of Poe’s stories  as you’re ever likely to encounter.

I read Tales in its entirety thirty-five years ago at college  and although I’ve dipped into them occasionally since then, I’ve never – until now – revisited the whole collection.

My teenage self found them hard going – dark,  ovewrought, over-written and just plain odd.  One or two of them – like The Masque of the Red Death – simply went straight over my head.

It was, therefore, an enormous surprise to return to them  and discover an entirely different book and an entirely different author.

If you have no taste for the Gothic, then Tales of Mystery and Imagination is not the book for you; but if you’re prepared to put your rational mind on ‘hold’ and accept the world that Poe invites you into … you can easily  get lost in the dark web he wove.  He was a man who knew how to mess with your brain – how to plug into your most primitive fears and ratchet up the tension to snapping point.

Being buried alive – one of the most primaeval fears of all -  features prominently in  The Fall of the House of Usher,  The Premature Burial and The Cask of Amontillado and even when it’s NOT central to the story, it’s still there, in the suffocating and claustrophobic atmosphere that suffuses so many of the tales.

One of the (many) things that my older (and one hopes wiser) self found most surprising was the dark  humour in some of the stories, a thing that completely escaped me before.  Like the narrator of The Oblong Box thinking that his friend was overly attached to the ‘artwork’ in the eponymous container – especially as the box is six feet long by two-and-a-half-feet wide …

Many people – who know Tales of Mystery and Imagination only slightly, or by repute – would, if asked, probably tell you that they’re all horror stories – but that term doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.  The collection  contains what many hold to be the very first detective story – The Murders in the Rue Morgue – as well as that strange and nightmarish story of what Poe called ‘ratiocination’ – The Gold Bug.

The Premature Burial is an exercise in psychological screw-turning.  The Pit and the Pendulum certainly piles horror upon Gothic horror, but it too is more of a masterclass in psychological manipulation.

There is actually very little gore in any of the stories.  People and animals do die terrible deaths, but they aren’t dwelt on.  Poe creates vivid pictures in your mind and  leaves the rest to the power of your own imagination …

And then, there’s The Masque of the Red Death, about which there has been more debate than almost anything else Poe ever wrote.

Most  believe it to be an allegory about the inevitability of death – but Poe was on record as saying that he didn’t like allegory and had no time for literature that lectured its readers … so what does it mean, if anything?  I confess to having absolutely no idea  (and I’d be delighted to hear any theories that you might have) because it does appear to BE an allegory, and makes sense as such – but the story is so supremely well written, I really don’t mind.  The privileged guests in the abbey, barricaded against the plague; the diseased mind of Prospero with his windowless, single-colour rooms;  the ebony clock that stills the revels every time it strikes; the febrile atmosphere  … they’re all the products of a writer with an extraordinary imagination and a tight control of his craft.

The myth of Edgar Allan Poe – the insane, drunken, drugged crazed, possibly homicidal  paedophile  (a  misrepresentation for which we mostly  have to thank a little charmer called Rufus Wilmot Griswold) – has for many years obscured the more mundane – and infinitely sadder – reality of the man and his life.

He wrote the Tales of Mystery and Imagination not because he was pyschologically damaged, but simply because they were  what the public wanted to read.  He was trying to make a living from writing, and he knew what sold.   But,  being a true professional and a master of his art, he wrote them as well as he possibly could.  The fact that they are still in print, and still in demand one hundred and sixty years after his death is all the proof you need that he got them triumphantly right.

Bloomsbury Publishing.  October 2009.  ISBN: 978-4088-0343-1.  334pp.

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