Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, USA, in 1809. Poe, short story writer, editor and critic, he is best known for his macabre tales and as the progenitor of the detective story. He died in 1849, in mysterious circumstances, at the age of forty.
The midnight hour approaches. You lie in bed and try to sleep, but there is the howling of the wind outside, the creak of a floorboard, the scream of a cat, the ticking clock...
Your heart beats, your skin crawls, and despite yourself you reach for this book and enter a world like a nightmare, haunted by dark fears, guilty secrets and the bloody consequences of rage, revenge and obsession.
You cannot tear yourself away, these tales will appall and yet enthrall you, for no mere mortal can resist the master of Gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe.
For their supernatural grotesquerie and graveyard doom,[Poe's stories] foreshadow Stephen King and the "southern gothic" of Truman Capote... his work continues to enthral. His greatest tales radiate a dark humour and mockery that strike an oddly modern note.The modern horror novel owes an enormous debt to Poe, and the novel of psychological horror owes him almost everythingIf you love thrillers, you have to read these storiesPoe's work as a whole is a series of haunting improvisations on themes from the macabre that are hard to categorise, dazzlingly original and posthumously influential on an extraordinary range of writers from Baudelaire and RL Stevenson to Yeats, Wilde and Borges
